China Wants Out of Spam Blocks

SomeoneYouDontKnow writes: "Apparently, China is feeling the effects of the e-mail blocks Western ISPs are placing on Asian mail to prevent spam, as previously reported here. A group of Chinese legislators is calling for the blocks to be lifted because they're making it difficult for them to communicate via e-mail, and a signed article in The People's Daily is calling on China to ban spam. Maybe now some of the lazy admins of these spam-spewing mail servers will clean up their acts."

Comments

China just doesn't get it.

[Joe Groff]

The Chinese government has constantly shown how terribly naïve they are with regards to the Internet.

• They want to reap the commercial benefits without accepting the other consequences of a global computer network: namely, the inevitably open society the Internet promotes. Their feeble attempts at firewalling and sheltering their people are eventually going to collapse under the insurmountable weight of the reality that information wants to be free.
• They want to use email, but can't accept that people don't want crap to be mass-mailed to them. This is a sure sign that China's only interest in the Internet is monetary, and that it is our duty to block off abusive .cn mail servers to show them that this bullshit doesn't play on the open Internet.

China's always going to be in an awkward situation with regards to the Internet as long as they cling to their obsolete totalitarian, isolationist regime. Write your senators and tell them that all this dicking around with China is a farce, and must be stopped. Don't allow them on the Free Internet until they become a Free State, I say.

Re:China just doesn't get it.

[PoshSpod]

China's always going to be in an awkward situation with regards to the Internet as long as they cling to their obsolete totalitarian, isolationist regime. Write your senators and tell them that all this dicking around with China is a farce, and must be stopped. Don't allow them on the Free Internet until they become a Free State, I say.

Oh, boy. Where to begin? I think my favourite part of you post was the last line. You misunderstand the idea of freedom if you assume that you must be free to oppress others. China has a dictatorial regime, true; but if the internet is free then it should be embrace it, just as it embraces pornographers, neo-Nazis, gun nuts, religious zealots and all of the other dreadful things that we tolerate under the banner of free-speech but really wish weren¦t there.

Second point is this idea that we can force change onto countries by ignoring them. The Americans don't seem to have learned much from Castro in the last 30 years. If change is to be brought to China then the only options we have available are

to allow it to come fully into the free world and evolve

war. I know which option I prefer.

Chinese laws: genuine effort, but ineffectual

[dananderson]

"[In the] People's Daily, Xu Detian called upon the National People's Congress to pass a law banning the sending of junk e-mail."

This reminds me of my days in grad school in the early 1980s. I had two Chinese roommates. They subscribed to People's Daily to learn English (even though it had spelling and grammar errors, it was probably a good idea).

Anyway, after a while the paper began to sound repeative. It would continaully brag about some "new effort" to do something such as "end corruption" or "end pollution" or "improve education." That was done by passing laws saying "don't do this" or issuing a directive to "do that." Nothing would actually hapen, it appears, as I would read about a very similar effort a few months later.

So, although the Chinese are beginning to realize they need to do something about spam, don't hold your breath. Hopefully, they will come around some year to doing something effective . . . such as having ISPs actually respond to abuse reports and close open relays, for example.

Of course it is unfair

[Per Abrahamsen]

but please blame the spammers, and the lazy admins who don't stop them, not their victims.

Spam basically makes email useless, it is certainly not the near real-time media it used to be. Blacklisting can make email almost useable again. Of course, it is nowhere near as useful as before the spammers took over, but at least the signal no longer totally drowns in the noice.

Unless something effective is done to spam at the political level, we probably soon have to either give up email entirely, or switch to whitelists. With whitelists, only people in your address book can send mail to you directly. Other people may be able to come through after various kinds of verification. This will cut of many once useful features of email, but at least some core functionality will survive.

Please do not blame the people who try to make email survive in spite of the spam onslaught. Without these people, email would die.

Korea anyone?

[JPriest]

I'd say about 80% of my spam is from Korean schools. Here is a post from an abuse NG with a possible explanation for it. Myself and many others have tried a # of times to contact some of these schools for the last few months or so with no success.

Subject: Re: Korean Schools Proxy Project?

From Joel:
"> It is possible that Appleton, Wisconsin, High School has an open connect proxy on port 3128 and the Tuscaloosa Unified School District has an anonymous mail relay.
But, apparently, one group wired every K-12 school in South Korea and they made the same goddam error EVERYWHERE."

RE: from Rob
Thanks for explaining this, Joel. Somebody sent me a couple dozen spams (morts, credit card, work at home) in the last week, each relayed through a different Korean elementary school. None bothers to record the originating IP. Amazing.

A letter to the ambassador is in order.

Re:Overzealous Spamguarding

[metsfan]

Bandwidth isn't free. Spam takes up bandwidth. Sure, it doesn't take up a lot of yours, and you're probably paying by time, not by usage, but not everyone is. Major backbones get bogged down in it. AT&T's Worldnet e-mail had delays of up to a day because of spam. It gets expensive. It's not simply "deleting 10 messages a day," for anyone except the end user.

That understates the problem

[phr2]

First of all, deleting a spam message takes much more than 1/2 second if you count starting up the mailer every time you see the "you have mail" message and it turns out to be newly arrived spam.

Second, if you get 10/day, you actually don't have much of a spam problem compared to usenet regulars etc. I get hundreds of pieces of spam per day which is less than a lot of other people get. I manage to filter about 75% of it but the rest still takes much more than 30 minutes/year to deal with.

Third, even if it's just 30 minutes a year, which 30 minutes is it? A pinprick to the butt is much less annoying than one to the eyeball. An incoming email is an interruption almost like a phone call, breaking your train of thought and interfering with your work. A 5-second interruption several times a day is much worse than, say, no spam at all during the entire year except you're required to spend 2 hours on April 15 (tax day) looking at spam.

My filters get rid of lots of spam but occasionally catch a legitimate message, so once a week or so I spend a few minutes looking over the filtered messages. Batching them like that reduces the spam annoyance factor a lot, but it destroys the immediacy of the legitimate email.

The reason yahoo is on spam lists isn't unknown--it's obvious. Insane amounts of spam comes from yahoo addresses and has no signs of slowing. The obvious solution for you is get an address from a more responsible provider.

Why not default to SMTP blocking at ISPs?

[mosschops]

Recently I was helping diagnose a problem with mail delivery to a friends machine. It soon became apparent that incoming connections to the SMTP port were being blocked. After contacting the ISP it was confirmed that it was a default anti-spam measure, but they'd be willing to test the server to ensure relaying was disabled, and then unblock the port.

If Chinese ISPs were /forced/ to do the same thing it'd make clearing up the mess a lot easier. Legitimate, non-relaying servers would be opened back up, and it would leave the accidental servers inaccesible to spammers around the world. In fact, wouldn't this be a sensible policy for ISPs around the world?

Re:Common sense! NO open relay = no block

[gnovos]

If you have a problem you fix the problem.
We fixed a problem of recieving spam from their open relays by blocking them from sending to us.
We asked them to close their relays and they said no or didn't respond, so we blocked them.

I wonder if the trick might be to write mailservers that backtrack the email's headers and check for open relays before passing it on. No need to have an actual list, it would be automagic!

Censorship Firewalls & Spammer Blocking - Sigh

[billstewart]

It's really sad. China goes to all this work to suppress free speech and free thought for their people by hiring big American companies to build censorship firewalls to limit their access. Does that work? We can't tell, because the flood of spam that they *are* shipping out drowns the real speech by Chinese people, and is encouraging far more sites in the free world to block Chinese email than the Chinese corrupt oppressive government was successful in doing. Open email relays are easily used to forward spam, but are also useful in evading censors. It's really shameful.

Of course, if I wanted to put my Tinfoil Conspiracy Hat on, I'd say it was collusion between the unelected George Bush and the thugs in China's government to prevent cooperation between our democratic-leaning peoples, or some such rot. And if either side wanted to accomplish that, this might be the most effective way to do it. Truth is unfortunately stranger than fiction....

Market forces are the right approach

[billstewart]

We don't need the Chinese government to pass some law to make this happen - the free market *can* force them to do so, as the big Chinese ISPs get told "if you want to send mail to the outside world, you'll need to make your users block open email relays" - not told by the government, but by their service providers and by the big email sites in the outside world and the flood of bouncemails they get. And most of them will get the clue, and some of the rest of them, mainly smaller ones, will fail to get the clue and fail to communicate outside and fail at business. Or they'll get trashed by 31337 haX0rz having fun beating them up .

Of course, it *would* help if somebody would translate a bunch of anti-spam configuration information into Chinese and Korean.

Two wrongs don't make a right..

[jcr]

If the spam still continues, start sending mass-mailed anticommunist propaganda to random Chinese addresses through the same open relay. This will get that open relay shut down real quick.

Sorry, tempting as that tactic may be, it's an abuse of the random addresses in question.

Depending on how much monitoring the thugs do, it may suffice just to send yourself anti-communist screeds periodically through the open relay.

-jcr