Date: Fri, 21 Jun 2002 01:50:48 -0700 From: "Philip J. Koenig" <pjklist@ekahuna.com> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: "Hyunseog Ryu" <hyun@staff.norlight.net> Subject: Re: Korea (was: Sendmail Spam RBL) Message-ID: <20020621085049466.AAA647@empty1.ekahuna.com@pc02.ekahuna.com> In-Reply-To: <bulk.52383.20020620140542@hub.freebsd.org>
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> Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 15:45:00 -0500 > From: "Hyunseog Ryu" <hyun@staff.norlight.net> > > Hi, there > > As an Korean, I apologize for inconvenience. > But I want to give some background for SPAM email from Korea. > Korea government is very strict for SPAM email. > Even they have a law to govern SPAM email, which should include some > specific text in subject, > so it can be used for filtering by somebody who doesn't want to see that > at all. If they violate that law, they will go to jail or pay the fine. > But problem in practical manner is as same as here. They have too many > users with little knowledge of network operation. Maybe more than 60% of > population has Internet access from home, work, or on the road. More than > half of house has Internet connection via cable modem or DSL. [good info snipped] Hyun, First of all I want to thank you for your very detailed response and pointers to various South Korean network resources, that is helpful info indeed. Second I want to point out that personally I have never supported country-wide blocks for the purpose of spam abatement, assuming we are talking about rules which affect more than one person's mailbox. (If a particular individual wants to filter out all messages sent to them that contain the letter "e", they can go right ahead. Where I draw the line are system administrators who institute extreme measures, and do not fully inform or receive the consent of those whose communications these measures will affect. Imagine how a Korean person living in the US would feel if they were waiting for an important message from home, only to find out later that their ISP had one day decided to block any email from Korea without informing any of their users about it.) That being said, a substantial percentage of spam is at least relayed through South Korea. And as you mention, language differences may be one reason it isn't getting addressed as well as it should be. Another reason is that it is indeed true South Korea has a higher percentage of its people online than anywhere else in the world (including the USA), so there is a higher potential for abuse. (Many people forget to consider the size of the entity when they proclaim them "bad".. this is why if I get a single spam from an AOL or MSN or Yahoo address, I consider it less serious than a single spam from a tiny domain belonging to one small company, for example.) As for the Korean law you cite - I hate to tell you but most people involved in fighting spam characterize such laws (ie the ones that stipulate that spam must be "marked") as actually PRO-spam. Those laws don't actually outlaw unsolicited email at all, they just put the responsibility on the end user to take measures to block it, and that is the wrong approach. (In the US, most of the "antispam" legislation has also been like this, and personally I think such laws are worse than useless. Big business interests are typically the ones who lobby for these types of useless "antispam" laws.) > As a citizen of the Internet work, we might need to have some patience to > deal with foreign country, and cooperate to find reasonable resolution for > the problem. Worth repeating. -- Philip J. Koenig pjklist@ekahuna.com Electric Kahuna Systems -- Computers & Communications for the New Millenium To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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