I was invited to both the Internet Society of China's meeting in Beijing earlier this week and the Anti-Spam conference in Kunshan yesterday but had to skip both because of prior commitments and I'm also about to get on a plane to go to the USA for a few days. But I had a brief call from one of the participants of the Kunshan event last night where I heard about ISC's ideas to utilize e-stamps to thwart spam. This news was also posted on our ChinaTechNews.com a few minutes ago.

This e-stamp idea is a constant proposal in China, and something that Korea's Daum.net has used in the past, but I think it's going to be difficult to implement so late in the game for China. There are already multiple deliverability problems in China among the different portals (chalk it up to infighting, competition, et al.) and too many email origination points and recipient points. If China did do this, it would get done, but the idea is to charge users for the e-stamps, and people might just resort to instant messaging. Perhaps on the corporate email side it is still possible, but we'll have to wait and see. 4-5 years ago we would often have heated discussions at conferences on the matter, but things seemed to have died down since.