Donnie

China enacted his own anti-spamming legal system in a new regulation named Electronic Mail Administrative orders (EMAO hereinafter). Announced by the Department of Information Industry, which is a branch of China’s central government, this Subordinate legislation has a national effectiveness.

From article 11 to article 17, EMAO established a strict but recapitulative regulation dealing with the severe problem of spamming, which has a few characters as follows:

Firstly, EMAO adopts a strict “opt-in” regime to prohibit the rampant spamming activities in China. Overseas experience has been inconclusive as to whether an opt-in regime or an opt-out regime is better in curbing spam. The opt-in regime requires the sender of commercial electronic messages to have pre-existing business relationship with the recipient, or have obtained consent from the recipient before he could send commercial electronic messages to that recipient. While an opt-out regime requires the sender of commercial electronic messages to stop sending further commercial electronic messages to a recipient if the recipient so requests, but before receiving such a request, the sender may continue to send such messages to the recipient. In article 13, the order prohibit “any organization and individual” sending or relegating to others sending e-mail in which includes commercial advertisement content “without an unambiguous consent” from the recipients.

Secondly, EMAO prohibited some technical applications that often used by spammers, while the regulation does not covered all possible illegitimate techniques. “Address-harvesting” are “dictionary attacks” are prohibited by article 12. Nevertheless, the conduct of using scripts of other automated means to register for multiple e-mail address, and then sending e-mails via these address (named as “automatic throwaway accounts”) dose not be mentioned in EMAO.