China becomes second largest spam receiver

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Last updated at: (Beijing Time) Thursday, March 18, 2004

China becomes second largest spam receiver

China, a country with 68 million Internet surfers who receive 46 billion junk e-mails per year, has become the world's second most popular destination for spammers, after the United States.

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China, a country with 68 million Internet surfers who receive 46 billion junk e-mails per year, has become the world's second most popular destination for spammers, after the United States.

The Internet Society of China (ISC) said that by the end of last November, China's Internet servers had received altogether 150 billion spam e-mails, accounting for 30 percent of the country's total e-mails.

"It's a great waste of resources," said Gong Shaohui, a member of an anti-spam association. "Moreover, if China is dumped on withjunk mail, less servers will be left in use here."

Last year, the ISC publicized two groups of spammers' IP addresses and set a deadline for them to stop sending junk e-mail.But the situation didn't improve much.

"There are two major reasons for this," said Huang Mingsheng, the president of 263 Group, a well known Internet service providerin China.

"One is the lack of legal punishment for spammers, and the other is that many e-mail service providers are reluctant to invest in anti-spam technology," he said.

In the recently concluded National People's Congress (NPC), Kong Xiangmei, an NPC deputy who submitted a proposal for enactinga law against junk e-mail, said the problem can not be revolved by relying on alert "netizens" and filtering by websites. It has to be dealt with by the law, he said.

In April, the State Council will open a seminar to discuss laws and regulations to enhance Internet safety.

Also in April, four leading US Internet service providers, America Online, EarthLink, Microsoft and Yahoo, announced lawsuitsagainst spammers responsible for hundreds of millions of junk e-mails.

A report from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) has warned that an estimated 50 percent of all e-mail messages in circulation by the end of 2003 could have been unsolicited spam, which may have cost as much as 20.5 billion dollars in wasted technical resources.

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