Chinese and US officials seek joint spam solutions

An initiative to reduce global spam levels involving senior internet officials in China and the US will deliver its first findings next month.

The Fighting Spam to Build Trust report will contain voluntary proposals for dealing with spam, which makes up around 85 per cent of global email traffic.

The bilateral talks were organised by think-tank the EastWest Institute, and are aimed at encouraging the sharing of best practice.

"This is the first time such a dialogue had taken place," Karl Frederick Rauscher, chief technology officer at the EastWest Institute, told V3.co.uk.

"There is so much distrust between the two countries in cyber space, but we have profound dependencies on economic and technical matters. It's quite amazing how we have such mistrust."

Rauscher co-chaired the discussions with Yonglin Zhou, director of the Internet Society of China's network security committee.

Zhou explained that he was surprised by the level of support for such talks in China, and said that the report will contain voluntary proposals for private companies on how best to cut spam levels.

Michael O'Reirdan, chairman of the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group and distinguished engineer at Comcast, added that the dialogue with China is a " welcomed breakthrough and a real step forward".

"It comes at an opportune time, and can build on the work that has been going on at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group for several years," he said.

The US leads the world in spam generation, but China has had notable success in dealing with the problem after a crackdown by Chinese domain registrars on rogue operators, and is no longer one of the world's top spam generators.