China issues e-mail rules to fight spam

news
Mar 8, 20061 min

New regulations require the word 'AD' be displayed and for ISPs to retain mail server IP addresses for 60 days

China’s Ministry of Information Industry (MII) has published a set of regulations that govern e-mail services and include several provisions intended to cut down on the amount of spam that Chinese Internet users find in their in-box.

The new rules go into effect on March 30.

As expected, the regulations require e-mail advertisements to include “AD” or the equivalent in Chinese characters (guang gao) in the subject header. They also require e-mail service providers to register the IP (Internet Protocol) addresses of their mail servers with the authorities.

Other provisions include a requirement for e-mail service providers to keep logs of e-mail traffic, including the IP addresses of all e-mail senders and recipients, for 60 days.

Service providers that violate the new regulations can be fined up to 30,000 renminbi ($3,729).

The e-mail regulations, in Chinese, can be found on the Web site of the Internet Society of China’s Anti-Spam Center: https://www.anti-spam.cn/doc/glbf.doc.