China's highest level anti-spam summit was held in Beijing this past weekend. Representatives from businesses that account for more than half of the world's email services attended the forum.

Meeting members met to discuss effective ways of dealing with unsolicited bulk and commercial email and looked at the legislative, technical, standards and international cooperative solutions. According to the international anti-spam group Spamhaus, China ranks second in the world for the amount of spam that originates from the nation's Internet servers.

Officials from the Information Office of the State Council and the Telecom Management Bureau of the Ministry of Information Industry also presented at the conference, giving full affirmation to the anti-spam effort made by the Internet Society of China (ISC). The ISC has been working hard this past year with representatives from groups like Spamhaus to find ways to stem the amount of spam in China.

Representatives from China's Internet industry, including Netease's CEO Ding Lei and 263.net's CEO Huang Mingsheng called on stronger efforts for the administration of spam at the conference. Delegates from America Online, Microsoft and Yahoo expressed their willingness to cooperate with Chinese email service providers on the anti-spam cause.

Deputies from China Telecom, China Netcom, China Mobile, Sina and Tom Online also held in-depth studies and consultations about anti-spam technology and management with international counterparts and they discussed issues such as the latest global email technology and anti-spam standards.

Both Sina and Tom Online have found themselves blocked internationally in the last year by groups like Spamhaus because of unsolicited bulk email from those companies' servers.