A Blacklist of Chinese Spammers

With China no longer feeling pround of its position in the top 3 main sources of spam on a worldwide basis, the coutry is going a step beyond the bureaucratic measure to fight spam by licensing email servers undertaken back in April, 2006, and has recently launched a blacklist of Chinese spammers :

"The comprehensive anti-spam processing platform (http://www.iscbl.anti-spam.cn/) will post a regularly updated blacklist of spam servers, allowing telecom operators and mail service providers to access the information. Over 100,000 IP addresses have been blacklisted thanks to public reports, said Zhao Zhiguo, vice-director of the telecommunications department of the Ministry of Information Industry. A "white list" of mail service providers will also be posted on the website, boosting the development of lawful mail service providers, such as the country's big players Sina, 163 and Sohu. ISC Secretary-General Huang Chengqing said the website will gradually open to the public and businesses to accelerate anti-spam efforts domestically and internationally."

And despite that major blacklist providers have been providing such lists for years, China's inside-towards-outside approach is a great example on the most effective, yet not so popular approach of dedicating more efforts into filtering outgoing spam, compared to the current approach of filtering incoming one. Only if responsibility is forwarded to the ISPs doing nothing to filter outgoing spam -- who will later on offer you a free spam protection to differentiate their USP -- we can start seeing results. 7h3 r3$t i$ a cat and mouse game, and overall decline in the confidence and reliability of email communications.

World spamming map courtesy of Postini.