Well, I don’t know where you’re getting the notion of Koreans changing their email monthly — none of the many Koreans I know do that: in fact their email addresses (both with Korean services, and foreign ones like Gmail) have been relatively stable for periods of years and years at a time. Also, Koreans use the word “spam” to describe “spam” and the ones I know consider it a nuisance as much as anyone, even if there are many spambot operators here.

I agree that the standards of Internet culture weren’t adopted here, partly because of how suddenly the net appeared and spread here. One example, a really simple one, is that Koreans tend to avoid writing their actual name in the Name slot for their email. They’ll write quotations they like in Korean, or motivational phrases like the Korean equivalent of “Just do it!” or “I will succeed!”, or random English words (“Cutie,” for example, or “Green Apple”) or their English name (which I, at least, never use) and, combined with the fact that many of them forget to sign off on their emails with their real names, it’s quite often that you end up receiving an email and wondering who the hell sent it to you.

Another example is that Korea seems to be lacking a kind of dispute resolution mechanism for online spats. Its as if much of the Internet here works like Usenet used to for us. People get involved in big witch-hunts, and online groups form around topics like “Anti-English Spectrum” — a group that is, essentially, a kind of vigilante hate-organization against white male English teachers here. (Though their websites violate the rules of the portal site that hosts them, they seem never to get banned.) It’s not just xenophobic: the most famous case is the witch-hunt of the Dog Poop Girl.

Though, I’m not so sure Korea would have adopted Western “netiquette” wholesale anyway: after all, it’s not like they were interacting that much with Western net users. You have to see Korea’s internet for what it is: a sort of cultural echo chamber, in some senses cut off (by language) from the rest of the planet except at a few portal points. That might change when machine translation arrives, but for now, the norms of Korean Internet culture is only tangentially influenced by the norms of global Internet culture. (And with the Net suddenly all over, people didn’t slowly build up netiquette as we did: they got email and blogs and portal news sites all at the same time, meaning our Usenet experience (rampant abuse and flame wars and vicious nastiness) got smeared out across all the various media online in the Korean net.

Not that Korea actually needs to adopt OUR standards, but the problem is that the alternative that has developed is a rather vicious, and prominent, “nasty netizen” subculture, plus top-down solutions that have as much to do with government tracking and control of online behaviour as with minimizing the social nastiness of the Korean portions of the internet.

Spam appears to be universal in korea; it’s considered an acceptable form of advertising and everybody just changes their email address monthly in order to deal with the huge barrage of trash. Nobody thinks twice about this, because they have never seen anything else before. The notion that the rest of the world considers this quite unacceptable escapes them.

This results in Korean email being blocked by much of the rest of the world, and that is bad for everyone on the internet, Korean or not.