| The New Spam Act |
| As of the 10th April 2004 the Spam Act comes into force. |
This is a government initiative to stem the flow of unwanted electronic communication (the most common being e-mails) and appears to cover three main situations. Any business wishing to use e-mails to communicate with a list of addressees needs to be aware of the following information, even if it?s just sending the one e-mail.
1. Unsolicited e-mails from companies unrelated to you in any way and promoting goods and services that have not been asked for and that don?t necessarily relate to what you do in your day to day private or business life.
2. Business to business e-mails that come from companies who focus in one way or another almost exclusively on what the addressee does.
3. E-mails from a supplier of a product or service to their clients where clients have agreed to be sent such electronic messages. An example is an Accountant sending, via e-mail, a tax related link to information their client should to be aware of.
The Act seems clear in its desire to eradicate the first category (and hopefully it can have some impact on overseas spammers), and the third should fall outside the Act, as addressees have given their consent. The second category differs I that it relates to the situation where one part of an industry, when working with another, will use a general e-mail broadcast to keep the addressees informed of how they are trying to help. The Act seeks to provide an answer here in that it seems to allow relevant e-mails to be sent in this case provided the sender has either ?express consent? or ?inferred consent?. The former is quite easily understood while the latter may be less so.
Inferred consent. According to the National Office for the Information Economy (NOIE ? a major player behind the Spam Act), ?inferred consent? is where a company has been using e-mail communication for some time to a set of addressees who have not, during that time, asked to be unsubscribed and are therefore seen as not totally averse to receiving said e-mails.
It seems that if inferred consent is present then such broadcasts can continue. However, the Act specifies that any such electronic communication must note who the actual sender of the e-mail is and have a working and real means to allow an addressee to unsubscribe. Many of the Unsubscribe links in situation one above have, unfortunately, often been used as a way of confirmation for the sender that you?re actually there.
It is important to remember that even sending one e-mail without any form of consent will most likely contravene the Spam Act.
For more detail on the Spam Act please see either of the following links:
Spam Act 2003: A practical guide for Business.
Spam Act 2003: An overview for Business.
9th-April-2004 |
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