James Seng notes that China has enacted an anti-spam regulation. Taking a radical stance, the Chinese government will now require a license to run any electronic mail service. No, I’m not making a joke; it’s part of the regulation. James quotes the announcement, and then paraphrases:

They are asking anyone who runs Lotus Notes, Microsoft Outlook Service or just Linux+Sendmail/Qmail to have a license before they are allowed to have one.

The licensing is also not a “class license” or automatically granted. It say specifically you are not allowed to run one unless you got an explicit license.

I predict that on the one hand not even China can pull this off without a lot of scofflaws running such software anyway, but on the other hand, a lot of people will go to jail before the regulation changes. I wonder how this new regulation will interact with Yahoo! mail or Google’s gmail?

-jsq