International anti-spam crusades score big wins

International efforts to halt spam are ramping up this week with the news that the notorious Buffalo Spammer will be spending a few years in the clink and flagship anti-spam organisation SpamHaus has charmed the Chinese government into taking the problem seriously.

The Buffalo Spammer – so-called because he operated out of Buffalo, New York – has been found guilty of sending more than 825 million spam emails.

The spammer, real name Howard Carmack, will be sentenced to between three and a half and seven years for his crimes. He was convicted on 14 counts of fraud under a recently passed identity theft law.

While the spam community is now one man down, SpamHaus will be taking a different tack to scupper the spammers. Of all junk email landing in users' inboxes, 70 per cent will have come via China. It's a favourite tactic of US spammers, who route their spam through Chinese servers and host sites through the country's sites in order to dodge US spam legislation.

SpamHaus has now set up operations in China to help the government and ISPs stop the tide of junk email that originates from the world's second most prolific spam country.

Steve Linford, founder of SpamHaus, told silicon.com that overcoming cultural issues was one of the largest obstacles. The organisation had found its English language site being blocked due to the government's censorship policies and has now set up a SpamHaus written site in Chinese and hosted in China, with details on acceptable usage policies and contract text on the problem for ISPs.

"For a long time, China didn't know what to do about the problem. We've been talking to the Chinese network and we're finally getting the message across," he said.

China does have laws that ban spam but the commercial weight of the US spammers is often enough to persuade small ISPs to adopt a less-than-responsible attitude. The spammers offer the Chinese service providers about $100 a week – more than they usually make in a month – to host the sites and ignore the complaints they receive.

China is also adopting broadband at a phenomenal rate – it now has more subscribers than Japan - making the country an attractive proposition for bulk mailers.

The next country Linford would like to see on the spam-fighting agenda is Russia. "In China, there's an authority – Chinese government, ministers you can speak to. In Russia, it's more like the Wild West – there are so many criminals. It's a weird job to figure it out."