Spam - Backpage Briefing - China's National People's Congress seeks spam regulations - Brief Article

Telecom Asia, April, 2002

SPAM: China's National People's Congress last month had a new item on the agenda: the spare problem. China, which has no laws regarding spare, has become a growing source of global spam over the last few years -- so much so that more and more Western system administrators have been placing blocks on all email from Chinese servers.

NPC delegates have criticized the Western sysadmins for the blocks, claiming that a near or equal amount of spam originates from the West and passes through open relay servers in Asia -- many of them in South Korea and Taiwan as well as China -- making it appear that the Asian server is the source of that email.

Meanwhile, delegates asked the NPC to create laws making spare illegal. It won't be easy -- many Chinese system administrators are either unable to secure their servers against open relay because the instructions are only in English, or unwilling to block spam and face accusations of email censorship, according to Wired News. Meanwhile, Xinhua has reported that the MII doesn't consider the email blocks a big problem since only a small number of servers were being targeted.