News from the Forum on Green Network Culture Construction held in Kunshan this week is that the Internet Society of China will formally launch a whitelist for individual email users in order to provide a safer, faster, spam-free email service.

The whitelist is reportedly available to all individual Internet users, so long as they use their real name as credit guaranty. Once the user enters the whitelist, emails won't be mistreated as spam and can go through a special channel to avoid heavy online traffic.

According to Wang Xiujun, commissioner of the Anti-Spam Task Force, a total of 12 email service providers, including Sina, Netease, Net263, net.com.cn, Tom, Sohu, Yahoo, Corpmail, 21CN, Tencent, 35.com and Xinnet.com, have been included into the whitelist system. These email service providers are said to have about 82% of the total email users in China.

Users can go to the website of the Anti-Spam Center of ISC to register for free at the whitelist, which is currently in trial operation. They can bind their real name with one or more email boxes and can cancel the binding at any time.

Thanks to the effective measures taken in the past year , the ISC says spam in China has decreased. The latest survey of the Internet Society of China shows that the percentage of spam in the total emails that go through the Chinese Internet has decreased to 58% from 64% in the first quarter of 2006.

Danny Levinson, representative for Spamhaus in China, says the ISC has made good strides in the recent years to stem the tide of unsolicited bulk and commercial email in China. However, Levinson says more needs to happen to educate common Internet users about exploits and phishing that can hijack users' computers, turning them into spam-sending zombie machines.

China's achievement in anti-spam campaigns has been recognized by others in the international community. The statistics of global network security organizations like Symantec and Sophos all show that China has made remarkable achievement in anti-spam operations. Of them, Sophos' report says that China's spam has declined from 21.9% of the world's total in early 2006 to 7.5%.

In order to encourage the public to supervise email service, ISC has initiated a number of channels including the Email Report Center, reporting hotline, reporting email and reporting website. From February 21, 2006 to the end of August 2007, the Email Report Center received a total of more than 330,000 reports on spam.

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