China Tech News reports on the Internet Society of China’s new effort to fight spam in China:

News from the Forum on Green Network Culture Construction held in Kunshan this week is that the Internet Society of China will formally launch a whitelist for individual email users in order to provide a safer, faster, spam-free email service.

The whitelist is reportedly available to all individual Internet users, so long as they use their real name as credit guaranty. Once the user enters the whitelist, emails won’t be mistreated as spam and can go through a special channel to avoid heavy online traffic.

According to Wang Xiujun, commissioner of the Anti-Spam Task Force, a total of 12 email service providers, including Sina, Netease, Net263, net.com.cn, Tom, Sohu, Yahoo, Corpmail, 21CN, Tencent, 35.com and Xinnet.com, have been included into the whitelist system. These email service providers are said to have about 82% of the total email users in China.

While this is a well meant attempt to curtail one of the internet’s most visible and irritating problems, it suffers from two problems: one technical, one personal.

Uh-oh, I had an accident in my whitelist
Danny Levinson of Spamhous, an anti-spam organization, nails it:

…more needs to happen to educate common Internet users about exploits and phishing that can hijack users’ computers, turning them into spam-sending zombie machines.

You may register for the whitelist, but what happens you become infected by some malware and start spamming all the recipients in your address book? This is a common problem in China. Between poor computer management by users and administrators and a lively hacking community, subverted PCs are commonplace.

This is less of a concern for web-based email, but they face the another problem: stolen account data via trojans.

So what happens when the whitelist gets soiled? Will the email providers email the user? Will they get moved from the whitelist to a blacklist? Will users have to have their account frozen before they take steps to fix their problem? It’s being tested now, but I’m skeptical it will actually amount to something.

And as for the “special channel” for “faster” email service, it hardly seems to be worth the effort. Email is typically not a time-sensitive communications channel. Internet messaging and the telephone are what people use to communicate quickly. It just sounds like extra work for the email providers, if indeed they actually bother.

What’s more important, your privacy or fighting spam?
Users will have to give their real name in order to get on the whitelist. No word on how the email providers will authenticate this, but it will certainly give pause to anyone who cares about their privacy. Information provided to internet companies in China is subject to government “review”. With the monitoring tools that are in place on the internet in China, maybe users won’t want their emails to be traceable back to them.

What about these estamp things?
A report in the Shanghai Daily refers to discussions to implement an estamp solution for China. Estamps will provide a validation of identity for the sender to the user and presumably will cut back on spam.

This idea has been around for a number of years, but has gone nowhere. Estamps are an iPain in the eButt to implement. It requires additional software for mail servers, email providers, and client software - all of which must be interoperable between different email programs. Add to that is the question of managing the estamps and exchanging information about it and it becomes evident why this idea has never taken off.

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