China-based 35.com has just launched an "Overseas SMTP Forwarding" service which the company claims is able to forward emails from Chinese to overseas receivers with 100% success.

Currently many China-based email servers have trouble connecting to the outside world because those servers are blocked by many server administrators around the world. Spamhaus, the world's largest anti-spam watchdog group, lists hundreds of China's Internet Protocol (IP) addresses as spam-friendly. According to Spamhaus, China is the second highest place from where unsolicited bulk email originates. The 35.com service is focused on getting around the blocks put in place by groups like Spamhaus.

"Sending email from outside China is still not a fool-proof method for ensuring that email is not marked as unsolicited commercial email," says a representative for Spamhaus based in Shanghai. "While we provide a well–verified list of originating IPs from around the world, individual email administrators can still block email based on any number of heuristics. For example, in China the Netease website has in the past blocked all English-language email, regardless of point of origin, with the word 'newsletter' in the subject line. Also, there is never 100% success on sending emails–there will always be a small margin of undeliverables."

The Internet Society of China has in recent months accused groups like Spamhaus of harming China's Internet growth because of the blocklists. Spamhaus responds that it only compiles the list of errant servers and it is up to individual email administrators to block servers in China around the world. Spamhaus also says that it is actively working with law enforcement and policy-making bodies in China to hunt and terminate spammers, hackers, and phishing culprits operating from China-based servers.