The Internet Society of China (ISA) has announced that the country has blocked 127 spam servers across the globe since Tuesday as its latest move to fight against the increasing amount of junk mail in the Internet.

"This has been the first large-scale spammer blockade launched by the Chinese Internet industry," said Ren Jinqiang, an ISA official.

He said e-mail messages from the sanctioned servers will be automatically refused by recipient servers.

Of all the blocked servers, 90 are from Taiwan of China, 29 from outside China and 8 from China's mainland, including the popular Internet service provider Shanghai Online.

The blacklist was the result of one month of monitoring work by the ISA, Ren said.

Once these servers stop sending junk mail in the next three months, the ISA will resume its normal operation.

Ren said his organization published the names of those to be punished a month ago, but has so far not received any reply from the Taiwan side and has noticed that there has been no obvious improvement by the spam-producing servers on the island.

On Aug. 8, the ISA publicized 225 spam servers and their IP addresses across the globe, of which 23 are from China's mainland, 97 from Taiwan, 4 from Hong Kong and 101 from outside China.

Many Chinese Internet users have been complaining during the past weeks that their e-mail in-boxes have been plagued by several hundred pieces of junk mail daily and some have had to give up e-mail addresses used for years.

(Xinhua News Agency September 9, 2003)