China Closes More Than 4300 Open Email Relays

[bill]

A step in the right direction...

ISC Shutters Services Of More Than 4300 Chinese Open Email Relays [chinatechnews.com]

Huang Chengqing, secretary general of the Internet Society of China, has disclosed that ISC has closed down the open email proxies and relays of more than 4300 email service providers.

Huang says as many email servers in China have a forwarding or open relay feature, they have been made used by illegal spam senders from foreign countries to send spam to users. Huang says the other problems of spam will be solved through two measures. One is to open a spam email reporting center and the other is to set up a white list mechanism to rank the credit status of email servers.

[pageoneresults]

You have to wonder if this is going to put a dent in global spam?

[jsinger]

Penny stock spam has virtually stopped within the past few months. Two years ago it was a huge portion of the spam I received.

Spam, in general, is way off over the past two years.

[Calculus]

I think the penny stock spam has generally stopped because the SEC put some new rules in place about buying/selling the pink sheet stocks.

Plus, I think they started to follow the money trail and although most probably didn't get any of the scammers, they put pressure on the brokers to better police their clients.

Good while it lasted though, apparently the organised ones were making 1%-2% a day after costs.

[Lord Majestic]

I think penny stock scam was too easily traceable (if there was such desire), and SEC must have done something about it, which is a good thing.

China should focus not on open mail relays, but on people there who provide "bullet-proof" services to spammers of all kinds - if China imposed extremely harsh punishment on those people then this would have helped to crack down on this problem big time.

[LifeinAsia]

It's not the open mail relays that are the problem (we've blocked just about all Chinese IPs and still get a ton of SPAM), although I agree it's a good step.

The problem is all the sites that are advertised in the SPAM messages that are hosted in China. When the tanks start rolling into (over) those data centers, then I will start rejoicing. Then again, all the SPAMMERS will just move on to the next country that doesn't care about policing its activities because it brings in revenue.

[Wlauzon]

I wonder if the main reason is really that in China "spam" translates to "Tibet"...

We never got that much spam from China, Russia and ex-Soviet seems to be the worst.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 4:40 pm (utc) on April 30, 2008]

[Lorel]

I was wondering where my spam mail went. Darn! Now I have nothing to read.

[koan]

There's a major penny stock spammer who got prison time lately (yay!), so that might also explain the drop for these kind of spam.

[ildarius]

Jail time for spam?

[Lord Majestic]

Jail time for spam?

Capital punishment would be more appropriate.

[Baruch Menachem]

The penny stock stuff was 75% of my spam for a long time. I always forwarded it to the SEC. Not that it did any good... but now that the penny stock spam has pretty much ended for the last year, I get almost no email at all.

The viagra email has pretty much stopped too.

of course, with China being the place it is, you sort of wonder if the real reason isn't something else more sinister.

[jerome]

Spam is nowadays essentially sent through compromised home PC (zombified "bots") all across the world, not just regular servers in China. That's why you could blacklist all chinese IPs and still receive loads of spam.
Recently an antivirus vendor found that 43% of compromised PCs in the world were from Europe. Even if the figure is off, the fact is that spam is coming from all over the world now.

The chinese government should go after the compromised servers that host worm codes used in many, many, web attacks nowadays. Once a worm has exploited a vulnerability to get onto a web server somewhere, it often fetches all its useful scripts from some server in China.

[Freedom]

Wow. That's why my usual 600 to 700 spam emails for VPXL #*$! enlargement pills (company hdq in china) is now down to about 200. It was getting way out of control. I have so many filters in place, but it felt like I was just sticking my finger in the dike.

Well, this is great. Hope it lasts.

[edited by: bill at 1:04 am (utc) on May 8, 2008]
[edit reason] fixed spelling [/edit]