1st Meeting
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AP Anti-Spam BoF during 2002 Shanghai APAN Meetings
Minutes of Asia-Pacific Anti-Spam BoF 28 August 2002 - Shanghai, China Scribed by Kevin Meyer and Kilnam Chon
Discussion:
KC said 90% of spam mail was being sent from countries in the Asia-Pacific region. ISPs in other regions were threatening to block traffic from the offending networks, and some clear action needs to be taken. It was unclear why some countries such as China, Korea and Taiwan had a bigger problem than countries such as Japan and Australia.
Most spam was advertising US-based 'products and services', but there was an increasing amount of foreign language spam (e.g. in Chinese, Korean, and Spanish). Some of these were also offensive and/or illegal in some countries.
There is a distinct lack of global coordination on this issue, and it was proposed that the NICs and ISPs in the region start working on this subject. The IETF was not thought to be the most appropriate forum as it was more concerned with protocol rather than operational issues.
There was a tour-de-table of the situation in each country(China, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, USA, Australia, and Europe), and the general impression was that there was less awareness on the measures that could be taken to prevent spam in the countries with the worst problem. Those countries that had adopted anti-spam measures - both technical and legislative - had significantly fewer problems.
YK said Japan checked for open relays and encouraged other anti-spam measures. They also had a domestic law that required unsolicited e-mail to include a standard header (although this could be circumvented at present).
KM said RIPE had developed a code of practice for ISPs, and the European Union was introducing a law that banned unsolicited electronic communications.
PW said the Australian ISP industry was strongly opposed to spam and took aggressive action to prevent it.
DL said US organisations that had been spammed were starting to take legal action against the spammers and their ISPs.
FS and ZQ said there was no ISP association between China and Taiwan, and therefore there was less coordination between them. In addition, they were operating in an extremely competitive environment and were reluctant to lose customers.
PW said they could in theory withdraw address space from ISPs that were not taking adequate anti-spam measures, but in reality it would be difficult. They could only reliably base their decisions according to spam they had received themselves as other complaints could only be treated as hearsay. In addition, there wasn't currently an appropriate forum within APNIC to undertake coordination activities.
KC said one problem was that many Asia-Pacific ISPs failed to act on spam complaints, and indeed even failed to respond to e-mails. KM added this was also a global problem and was an issue that was continually being raised at RIPE meetings.
It was therefore agreed that an initial meeting of NICs and ISPs should be held to discuss this issue further. APNIC is having its own BoF on this subject in the following week(September 5) in Japan, and RIPE NCC also holds the BoF on the subject.
KC suggested involving lawyers in the meeting in an attempt to gain an overview of what legislative measures were available in each country to prevent spam being sent to other countries. The ccTLD meeting in October in Shanghai was considered to be the most appropriate time and place. KM suggested that unsolicited mail should be considered as a general issue, rather than attempt to categorise it as offensive or illegal. Different countries had differing views on what was considered acceptable content, and it would probably be difficult to reach any consensus on this. This would not preclude nations from taking unilateral action if offenders breached national laws.
DL outlined a number of measures that could be taken against spammers:
Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email (CAUCE)
[1]
Pursuing legislative solutions
SpamCon Foundation [2]
General information and anti-spam tools
Mail Abuse Protection System (MAPS) [3]
Spam blacklist service
MAPS Transport Security Initiative [4]
How to secure your SMTP servers
YK said one of the main problems was the inadequacies of the SMTP protocol. Improving authentication would make it much easier to track spam mail from its source. Unfortunately, this probably required some action by the IETF.
It was suggested that the interested parties could try and speed-up this process. If they could identify the relevant technical problems, this could be used to exert pressure on the IETF. The opinion of individuals with expertise in this area (e.g. Patrick Faltstroem) should be solicited and compiled into a proposal.
Presentation materials (links to come):
Kilnam Chon, Agenda for APAN BoF on Net Abuse
David Lassner, Spam Resource
Newsweek, Spamming the World, 19 August 2002
Koji Okamura, Information Related to Spam E-mail(JP)
Qianli Zhang, Anti-Spam Practice of CCERT
Attendees:
Around 20 people from China, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, USA, UK, Australia, and Thailand.
Name, Oranisation, Country/Economy
Kilnam Chon (Chair) KAIST Korea
DaeYoung Kim APAN-KR Korea
Yasuichi Kitamura APAN-JP Japan
David Lassner Univ. Hawaii United States
Kevin Meynell TERENA United Kingdom
Paul Wilson APNIC Australia
Zhang Qianli CNNIC China
Fay Sheu NSCC Taiwan
Koji Okamura Kyushu Univ Japan
Kobayashi CRL Japan
BK Kim Korea United Kingdom
Anthony Lee Taiwan United Kingdom
Kyoko Day APIA -
HL Qian CNNIC China
- Minutes of Asia-Pacific Anti-Spam BoF 28 August 2002 - Shanghai, China Scribed by Kevin Meyer and Kilnam Chon
