China Wants Out of Spam Blocks 404
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."
Common sense! NO open relay = no block (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Now they want us to unblock them and the answer seems fairly obvious to me. NOT until you close your relays which is why you are blocked!
Quote: "Peter Lovelock, director of Beijing-based consultancy MFC Insight, said the National People's Congress might be swayed to pass laws calling for more rigorous management of Internet-linked servers in China in order to avoid international embarrassment."
If it's such a problem that your "Chinese legislators" are getting involved they should stop complaining that they're bring punished and fix the problem.
Actual URL (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Odd that China is looking to take barriers DOWN (Score:4, Informative)
It sounds like constipation to me... (Score:2, Informative)
On a different tone, if we can't ourselves pass any meaningful legislation here, why do you expect them to clean up? Given the fact 99% of the fucking spammers are from right here, the gun loving US of A, the problem with the open relays in China is just a side effect. If we had the proper laws here, maybe Sendmail would not come with relay disabled by default. We would all spend all the time dealing with this crap doing something more useful.
Korea (Score:3, Informative)
Probably along the line of china, the admins probably don't speak english or else couldn't give a shit to stop the spammers because I just keep getting it.
Ethikul biznizmen (Score:3, Informative)
This phenomenon is known as the "ethikul biznisman" problem. Buy a PC in a shop in China, and the salesman's English will be quite adequate, and he will also understand what you are saying. But bring it back one week later because of a defect, and he no longer understands a word of what you say, and his accent goes to hell.
As long as they want something from you, or they want to sell something, no language barriers exists. But as soon as you want sth from them, or have a complaint, then all bets are off.
Best include a link to the above-mentioned People's daily article [zaobao.com] (translation [google.com]) in your complaint mail. They do understand your language, but they might not (yet) do understand the consequences of their (non)acts.
Re:Ethikul biznizmen (Score:3, Informative)
Not always. I've had a problem with a joe-jobbing spammer that was sending spam with my name in the From line, and was spamvertising sites in China. Complaining (via e-mail) to the abuse@ and whois addresses of the various involved providers did yield exactly no response. So I called. The phone got picked up by a person whose only reaction was to say "hooee! hooee! hooee!" into the phone every now and then (this went on for a couple of minutes... yes, this was a pay call...). He did not even have the sense to ask around in his office whether there was any English speaking colleague around. A company running an international business (which an ISP is, by definition) should at least take care to list phone numbers of English speaking personnel into the relevant contact databases (whois).
However, after I started forwarding all the joe-job bounces back to the abuse and whois addresses (over a thousand per day...), suddenly I started getting back responses written in a very adequate English ;-)
Re:Let's not forget... (Score:4, Informative)
In case anyone thinks you're being cute, it's entirely possible that spammers might be executed in China. A brief overview of the crimes that people have been executed for [commondreams.org] are:
Surprised by any of the last ones? In 1979, there were 28 types of crime that carried the death penalty in China. By 1995, that had risen to 74, mostly by the addition of "economic offences". They admit to executing well over a thousand people a year (often after a public show trial or displaying the convicts in public places), and it's suspected that a lot more get a bullet in the head without even a record being made.
Unfortunately, the USA has a policy of not criticizing China's execution policy (or that of any other state), as we have some cleaning up of our own to do. Engaging cynicism mode, you might ponder that the only part of it that our partially hereditary, 90% incumbent political class really object to is the crackdown on corruption and bribe taking, but of course, rank retains its priviledges in China, and the biggest criminals get jail time while their minions are executed.
On the other hand, there is a certain horridly attractive efficiency to show trials and summary execution. Compare and contrast with the US system of interminable legal wrangling over minor technicalities, occasionally leading to fines that are either trivially small or unrealistically big, neither of which typically get paid.
When you read the very occasional article that "Spammer X is fined Y dollars", remember that's just the first step in actually making them responsible for their actions. Even if you can get the fine to stick to them and not their shell company, if they don't pay to a third party or collection agency, they have to be brought back to court again, and it has to be proven that they haven't paid, at which they generally plead poverty and agree to pay off their $5 million debt at $10 a month. And if they don't pay that... you see where this goes? Judges are loathe to jail people over non payment of fines unless they're taking a political stand against them. It's only nice, police, law abiding folks that pay fines. If you want to keep pursuing a third party to make them pay, you have to keep paying up front to do so. The only winners are, as usual, the lawyers.
Re:Overzealous Spamguarding (Score:4, Informative)
Lets say you work for a large company, with say 10,000 people. 10,000 people * 10 spams a day (low number, but lets go with that for now) = 100,000 spam emails a day. Thats a lot of spam. Now, lets say that each spam is about 10kb. 10kb * 100,000 spams = 1000000kb, or (1000000/1024) 976 megabytes of spam. Almost a gig of spam a day.
Now your company does not have a free pipeline to the internet. Lets assume for the sake of argument that they have to pay by the meg. Lets (wildly) assume that your company has to pay 15 cents per megabyte of traffic through their ISP.
Of course, thats just in internet feed charges. Assume that it takes the average person one second to read and delete a spam. With an average of 10 spams a day, thats ((10,000 * 10)/60) 1666.67 minutes per day, or 27.78 hours per day wasted on spam. Say the average person makes $20 dollars an hour, or about $40,000 a year. 27.78 * 20=$555.56 a day in lost time. Over a year, thats $202,777.78 in time lost to spam. Ouch.
So all those penis enlarger and diet spams are costing your company $256,000 a year. Multiply that by all the companies in the world that get spam, and you have a major financial burden.
It's nice (Score:2, Informative)
http://www/lenny.com/spam/
Im all for any method that fights spam