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Delegates at the annual meeting of China's National People's Congress roundly criticized Western systems administrators that are blocking all e-mail from China as a means to stop spam, but they also called for new laws to make sending spam illegal in China.
The National People's Congress is considered the primary political power in China. Its 2,989 delegates meet every March to debate legislation, policy and politics. This year spam had a central place on the agenda, according to reports from China's official news service Xinhua.
Last week, many Chinese newspapers ran articles and editorials calling for the National People's Congress to ban spam, some quoting a Wired News story warning that a cyber version of The Great Wall was being built to choke off the flood of spam from Asia.
But despite the calls to action, some anti-spam activists were skeptical that any real changes would be made.
"I do not see China taking any lead here," said Steve Atkins from SamSpade, an anti-spam service. "I see some delegates annoyed that their e-mail is blocked because their ISPs are spam-friendly. They're blaming Western network administrators for protecting their users from the torrent of spam originating in or relayed through Chinese servers, rather than blaming those Chinese system administrators who are corrupt or incompetent."
Some Chinese systems administrators said they were being unfairly embarrassed for the actions of Western spammers. While some of the spam from Asia that is currently flooding the Internet originates from Asian users, a near-equal amount appears to come from the West and is being passed through Asian servers via open relays.
Open-relay servers pass along messages from, or to, people who are not recognized users of that system. They are sort of a virtual money-laundering device for spammers, who use them to bypass local regulations against spam.
"There are hundreds of thousands of badly configured mail servers all over China," said Steve Linford of SpamHaus, an anti-spam site. "Western spammers call them 'blind relays' and sell lists of 'blind' Chinese relays to each other for hundreds of dollars."
Some Chinese systems administrators claim they did not know how to secure their servers, since the documentation that came with the equipment is in English. Bilingual techies in China have recently begun translating the documentation into Chinese in response to media coverage of the problem, according to Danny Levinson, chief operating officer of Xianzai, an e-mail service provider in Beijing.
But documentation won't assist those who are afraid to secure their servers. Several Chinese systems administrators said that they would not close the open relays on their servers, concerned that they would be accused of censoring e-mail if they did so, according to translator Mark Golden.
"I do not want to choose what is beautiful e-mail and what is not," said one systems administrator in the Guangdong province. "I will wait for advice (laws) to tell me what to stop and what to let go. Sometimes when you make your own choices, there is trouble."
Despite the recent furor, systems administrators in China are getting mixed messages about spam from the government, Golden said. An official of China's Ministry of the Information Industry, who was quoted anonymously in a Xinhua story on Monday, said the Western e-mail block was only targeting a small number of servers in China and wasn't a "big problem."
Many Western systems administrators are also blocking other primary spam sources such as Hotmail, Yahoo's free e-mail service, and e-mail sent from servers in Taiwan and Korea.
Linford said South Korea has "a massive open-relay problem" because every school server in Korea appears to have been configured by one company and all are running open relays.
California gubernatorial hopeful Bill Jones was accused of sending spam last week through a Korean grammar school, an action that caused his ISP to terminate his service.
"In China, the politicians need to explain to the ISPs that some behavior is unacceptable on international networks," Atkins said. "Contrast this to the U.S., where the ISPs need to explain to the politicians that some behavior is unacceptable."
