BEIJING, March. 23 -- An international anti-spam watchdog recommended e-mail users worldwide to block sina.com, China's largest Internet portal, because it allegedly allows its 100 million subscribers to send unsolicited messages.

    The Spamhaus Project said on its Web site Thursday that the portal had a three-year history of not blocking known spammers.

    The advice was sent to companies, universities, government offices and military installations, with a total of 260 million Internet users.

    "Sina.com does not care about spammers on their networks," the Spamhaus recommendation says. It advises e-mail users to "contact Spamhaus after sina.com has fixed these spam problems and has a plan in place to deal with future spam issues."

    Spamhaus had unsuccessfully tried for about a year to contact the portal about the problem, an Asia representative of the project said.

    "We have given them the benefit of the doubt in dealing with users who use their e-mail services," the representative said.

    "However, it's reached breaking point. The lack of adequate management of these types of services is ridiculous."

    Sina public relations representative Meng Xiangpeng said he had not seen the Spamhaus advice.

    Sina did not have a particularly severe problem, he said. Sina also runs a news portal, mobile phone text messaging services and online forums.

    "If it was really that much, we would not have that many people using our mailboxes."

    He said sina did continuous "research and development work" on stopping spam and had made progress.

    "But it is not something we can totally solve yet," he said.

(Source: Shenzhen Daily/Agencies)