I have no idea how blocking TLDs of entire countries with hundreds of millions of citizens can be considered a valid anti-spam advice.
Just like the parent comment explained, you are actively pushing all of those people into the hands of Gmail (or Yandex in this case).
It is very different if you offer it as a service to other people, or if you do it for yourself.
If you are doing it for yourself you know if you expect emails from country X or not. And if things change and suddenly you have a pen pal from there you can change your filters easily. So you can live with such simplifying assumptions.
If you are providing email services to masses of other people then you can’t make these assumptions of course. You have to use more sophisticated means then.
These things just get thrown in the large pot of heuristics.
The poster you’re replying to is talking about their filtering method for their own email. Presumably they know if they expect to ever receive an email from a given country.
Otherwise, let's hypothetically say you have a friend named "jacob peter" who really likes his initials (and doesn't understand the topic of this discussion), so he registers somewhere in Japan that lets him have dot-JP as his TLD. The only hypothetical way he knows to contact you is via your email server (let's also assume he doesn't do stuff like social media, phones, etc., so he can't find any other way and you have no way to contact him). If you have hypothetically preemptively blacklisted all of Asia's TLDs, then you'd never talk to him again for as long as you live, right?
Since he’s not real I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Maybe he’s kind of a dick.
Nowadays (irony of ironies!) most inbound spam is from gmail.
Do tell me more about this wonderful new method of spam filtering with absolutely no bigotry.
Just imagine the racket if Gmail would start de-prioritizing email from Alaska or Hawaii because, in their experience, that's a large source of spam. If might even be true, so what? That's the exact thing racists say, racism works: we found the guy suspicious because no black people live around these parts, so we knew he was up to no good.
you're making comparisons here that are so disjointed it's not even apples and oranges... it's more like apples and rocks...
this thread grew outta the spam filter setup of someone hosting their own email server. bringing gmail into this and talking about how they'd have a PR nightmare if they screw with hawaii doesn't work. yeah, they both send/receive email, that doesn't mean they're comparable in the way you're tryna say... i mean, apples and rocks are both round sometimes, but you wouldn't try comparing how they taste, right?
As someone who was on the receiving end of the "Romanian users have nothing to say to my users and postmastars there can't even RFC" blackholes, trying to get legitimate email delivered while respecting all the rules of the internet, I can only say that whomever thinks like that is an idiot and a bigot. Unfortunately, there are many such idiots on the internet at large, and the aggregate effect is that only large sites like Gmail can maintain good deliverability, which was the subject all along.
So... my apologies to the 12,000 residents of Tuvalu. I'm sorry to have to block you all, but for some reason your country code attracts spammers like flies to honey.
$35/year. That's not too bad. Compare to e.g. https://tld-list.com/tld/protection