In its latest battle against junk e-mail, China has blocked 127 mail servers it identified as responsible for spam, the official Xinhua News Agency said Tuesday.
"This has been the first large-scale spammer blockade launched by the Chinese Internet industry," Ren Jinqiang, an official with the Internet Society of China, was quoted by Xinhua as saying.
The crackdown came as Chinese Internet users complained they were being bombarded daily with hundreds of junk e-mails, Xinhua said.
Ren said e-mail messages from 127 servers will automatically be refused. Xinhua said the sanctions would be lifted after the servers stop sending junk mail for three months.
Ninety of the blocked servers were from Taiwan, eight were from the mainland and 29 were from elsewhere, Xinhua said, without providing other details. It did not say if other countries were being inundated by spam from the same servers.
Internet service providers in the United States and elsewhere sometimes resort to blocking specific servers in their war on spam. Those efforts succeed in curbing the number of junk messages reaching subscribers, though they can kill legitimate e-mail as well.
Ren said the blacklist resulted from a month of monitoring by the state-run Internet Society of China, a group of 140 members drawn from private companies, schools and research institutes. The Beijing-based group aims to promote the development of the Internet throughout the country.
Last month, the group published a list of 225 spam servers around the world.
With 68 million users, China has the world's second-biggest online population after the United States, according to government statistics.
Internet use for business and education is encouraged, although the communist government censors chat rooms and tries to block access to foreign sites run by dissidents, human rights groups and news organizations.
