The oddly titled "China Outlaws Outlook" actually details news of a recent law enacted by China that would require outbound email server operators to register their IP addresses 20 days prior to beginning to use them.

Assumedly, the Chinese government will offer an IP DNSWL (DNS White List) of registered servers and inbound mail server operators worldwide would have the option of rejecting mail from any other IP in China.

This may not occur, if the rest of the world becomes concerned about censorship issues. For example, what if the Governor of each US state selected which outbound email servers could operate from within his state, or the Senate Majority Leader could specify what American IP addresses could send outgoing mail.

From a fear / punishment and censorship perspective, the provision in the new Chinese law that requires mail server operators to keep a record of all mail incoming and outgoing for 60 days is in my opinion pretty significant.

Leveraging the power of communities and reputations can be an effective weapon against spam

http://acmqueue.com/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=346

1: Pervasiveness

2: Community-Based Filter Training

3: Emergence

4: Fingerprinting

5: Reputation

Here are links to recent press regarding LashBack's unsubscribe repuation services:

(Press Release) http://www.lashback.com/unsubscribe_compliance_certification.htm

(ClickZ) http://www.clickz.com/news/article.php/3550106 

(DMNews) http://www.dmnews.com/cgi-bin/artprevbot.cgi?article_id=34140&dest=article

(BtoB.com) http://www.btobonline.com/article.cms?articleId=25525

This article appeared last week on CNET News

Web site gives e-mail senders a reputation

It talks about CipherTrust's data collection appliances and their new TrustedSource Web site which provides reputation information based on that data.

 Meng Wong has a prototype project called Karma - so far I have found this page on it from July ...   more »

E L Castelli of LashBack, provider of unsubscribe services and sender scoring based on unsubscribe performance, blogs about Email Reputation Silos

Musings of a VC in NY has two pieces on email reputation: November 2004 opening up discussion of some good Internet reputation systems (not limited to email) and a post recognizing Sender Score's announcement at the beginning of July 2005

ReturnPath's CEO Matt Blumberg posts about Sender Score June 2005

ZDNet: Mail Cruncher trust-sifts spam from September 2004 excerpt "The Outbound Index, developed by Server Authority, is based on the premise that spammers tend to hide and move, whereas legitimate businesses tend to be stable and clearly identifiable. The service sorts e-mail based on factors such as domain age, relationships between server and domain, and sender stability."   more »