internet - American spam with Chinese characteristics

(Soon in Tidbits)

China’s 10th year on the internet has triggered off as many articles about spam as about censorship. China might be best in spamming, most of the mortgages, insurances and blue pills have to be consumer in the United States. China is only good for one percent of the total online advertisements and that is profoundly reflected by the percentage of Chinese spam I get. I receive about three hundred spam or virus-infected emails per day, because my Chinese ISP failed to install anti-spam software. The company I work for did and that email address is almost clean. So much for China being able or willing to stop unwanted traffic on the internet.
It does not mean nothing is being done against spam. China Telecom, the largest ISP here in Shanghai, blocks all emails that go to more than 25 email addresses, thus killing also all legitimate business and announcements for larger parties. Direct mailers in Shanghai have hired cheap labor that send out their – legitimate, they say – emails in batches of 25. Not a very interesting job I can assure you. We moved our email services to China Netcom, a competitor without those brute restrictions, since in China there is no wall or there might be some backdoors too.
This almost anarchistic way the society functioned, fired up with an unstoppable economic growth, makes the number of issues the central government can pursue rather limited. And although I despise spam, I do think other problems – say AIDS – are much more urgent than spam. When the advertisers of spam cannot be stopped, just forget about stopping Chinese ISP who smell money.