Zhou Jinfeng, a Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPC) deputy and president of Zhong Xi Company, has told local media that he plans to submit proposals concerning the acceleration of anti-spam legislation during the CPPC meetings currently underway in Beijing.
Zhou submitted a proposal named "Advice on Strengthening the Anti-spam Effort" during last year's session, and he appealed for the government's support on anti-spam legislation. However approved legislation has been slow to arrive and this year Zhou hopes for better reactions from his fellow legislators.
China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) Anti-spam Coordination Team director Li Yuxiao has disclosed to local media that the Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has been working on drafting email management rules. The rules are nearing completion and will be issued soon.
Li Yuxiao says that even before any legislation is enacted, CNNIC, as the organizer of the anti-spam movement in China, will continue to focus on building email blacklist and whitelist mechanisms. Part of this process will be to allow all whitelisted companies who dutifully follow the CNNIC "Internet Public Email Service Regulations" to continue their operations unabated. However CNNIC will also use these guidelines to crackdown on those operators who allow unsolicited commercial email (UCE) through their networks.
According to Li Yuxiao, CNNIC has made dramatic improvements in enhancing international cooperation for anti-spam operations. In the "London Action Plan" announced by the EU on February 25, 2005, 25 EU member countries and 13 Asian countries, including China, promised to work together to curtail email overloads on Internet networks. International organizations like Spamhaus have also been trying to help authorities in China since last year formulate sound email policies.
A recent CNNIC survey shows that Chinese netizens received an average of 4.4 normal emails each week in the latter half of 2004, which is less than the 4.6 in the first half of that year. At the same time, the average amount of unsolicited commercial email they received each week dropped from 9.2 in the first half of 2004 to 7.9 in the last half of the year.
Though spam seems to have slightly declined according to those figures, the biggest difficulty is still finding the original senders of spam. In China, it has been difficult to find the owners of certain IP (Internet Protocol) addresses because often the IPs are registered using proxy services, or are registered with false contact information. Li Yuxiao says the newly enacted "Internet IP Address Record Management Measures" are one way to solve the problem. These new measures will require better contact details from owners of Internet-based services.
