About a year ago, Chinese website names with the .CN Top-Level Domain dropped to only RMB1.00 in China (about US$0.12 at the time). This was meant to galvanize Chinese website owners and brands into using the .CN TLD because of patriotic and security issues.

However, because of the cheap domains, spammers around the world purchased many of these .CN domains. And for those of you on some of the security-related IRC channels over the last year, you've seen more and more news about how more global ISPs and system administrators are starting to block both access to .CN websites and email from .CN email addresses because too much spam is coming from .CN domains. It should be noted that most of this email is not from Chinese spammers, but rather from foreigners living outside of China who utilize these .CN domain names.

Because we both manage hundreds of email marketing databases for our corporate clients and I work with some of the government groups in China on email/database safety, I've seen this all beginning to bubble up in the last few months. Parallel to this, in the last 3 weeks we've dealt with similar problems and helped Net.cn and Sohu.com with their spam issues (they were getting blocked around the world). Bottom line: companies with .CN domains are having an increasingly difficult time getting their emails delivered outside of China. Some cranky overseas sysadmins are lazy and rather than block specific .CN domains, they block all .CN domains.

Global anti-spam organization Spamhaus serves over 650 million users (I am a rep for them in China) and they have just about thrown their hands up in the air and have frustratingly warned of a possible total block on .CN domain names, which would immediately mean that Spamhaus users like Hotmail, Yahoo, and others would, by default, not be receiving any email from .CN domain names. Thankfully this will not happen, as it is not really in the best interests of anybody to go so far — CNNIC chiefs are now talking to Spamhaus' technicians to help assuage this problem.

Blocking email from China is not new. Hundreds of millions of people rely on SpamAssassin (you most likely are using it though probably don't even know) to block unwanted email. One of the earlier versions of SpamAssassin actually assigned a pretty high default heuristical value to any email coming from a domain that had "china.com" in it. That means that all email from the CDC Corporation's subsidiary China.com (disclaimer: they are our client) automatically received a high spam number, and any other domain like "MyCompanyInChina.com" or "ILoveChina.com" or "SomethingChina.com" automatically received high spam settings. Our company warned SO MANY of our clients who were setting up their company domain names NOT to put a "china.com" in their domains, but it's a case of "huh? that makes no sense…" and they would almost always still go buy a "*china.com" domain name — even if we sent them this list of all the caveats to avoid when sending email.

I have lots more to say on this subject, but I'll keep it very brief, as we usually get paid for our advice on these subjects. CNNIC just issued a new rule that allows these same domain name owners to more easily change their registration details. Though this is generally a good thing, it will also provide some of the hackers and spammers the tools they need to keep changing their whereabouts on their domain name registration.

The other thought that arises as I write this is it's awfully difficult to find Internet advertising and marketing companies who truly understand both the technical side and the cosmetic side of the business — in China, or elsewhere. If somebody knows what they are doing, they are not wasting their time working in somebody else's Internet marketing company, but rather starting their own business. We deal with clients all the time who have been trained poorly by their past suppliers and providers and it's tough as heck to re-train them.