Asia Diary Day 2: Meeting Receivers in Beijing

By Alex Rubin
Vice President, Business Development

Last week I wrote about a deliverability seminar in Singapore with some of APAC's top senders. During our Asia tour we also had a roundtable session with many of the top ISPS in China and Yahoo & Microsoft. The spirit of the session was a chance to improve communication and collaboration in the ISP community.

This is a brief summary of some of the comments expressed by these members of the Chinese ISP community:

• They have general problems with communication outside the region. Most of their interest is finding contacts and opening channels of communication to resolve network block issues. They want to know internal blacklist criteria and urge transparency.

• They have little awareness of common North American and European ISP operation practices like:
  (a) Port 25 blocking
  (b) Spam scanning outbound mail
  (c) Walled gardens - the ability to lock out virus infected users.

  These practices help clean up the internet for everyone.

• There also seemed to be little usage of popular tools like Spamhaus PBL or Industry advancement organizations like MAAWG (Messaging Anti Abuse Working Group).

• Most of these Chinese ISPs have not adopted feedback loops - either to subscribe to available North American Feedback Loops or to offer their own FBL services. The original intent of FBLs was for ISPs to identify and stop spam sources originating from their networks.
  

These Chinese ISPs are working through their official channels -- namely The Anti-Spam Center of the Internet Society of China (ISC ) -- to increase international collaboration. The ISC acknowledged the genuine effort made by Return Path, Microsoft and Yahoo attempting to increase industry collaboration. The ISC reiterated pledges to help increase data exchange, communication and general knowledge sharing. Definitely good news, both for the email community in China and for the wider email universe.