New spam law could catch companies by surprises
New spam law could catch companies by surprises
The new Australian spam law could cause huge problems for businesses unaware they are breaking the law through sending out direct marketing emails and newsletters.
Its powers for imposing penalities will be released on April 10th.
Legitimate businesses could lose out the most, although the new law is designed to crack down on junk mail, from porn sites, companies which constantly pester people about their products and hackers who try to infiltrate people's email accounts.
The new laws will demand that companies change their email marketing policy or risk facing action by the ACA (Australian Communications Authority) for being in breach of the law. This could result in either a telephone warning, or at the worst, a fine as high as a million dollars.
Peter Knight, an expert lawyer in computer and technology law, outlined the implications of the new Federal Spam Act 2003, which was released on 12 December 2003. "The law will demand that companies should send out any marketing information if they do not have prior consent from the recipient. The only exception will be if the email is factual. However, if an email has reference to an invitation, such as: "We are having a wine tasting event, would you like to come?" anywhere on a factual email, that will be considered to be spam, because it will be considered to be marketing information.
"Certain government, charities and education sectors will be exempt from this law, however. The purpose of the law is to make it easier to prosecute spammers, but it does cause problems for corporations. If you get a business card from a function and ask them if you can send them an email about a function, that is fine, but you can't then continue to email them marketing information about future functions without their consent. Similarly, if a person in a company suggests that a company should email their colleague information about a function, that will be considered spam because the end recipient did not acknowledge consent."
Chy Chuawiwat, managing director of Clearswift Asia Pacific, which is a security software company that specialises in email and web monitoring and filtering, offered advice on how to get legitimate marketing emails through spam filtering systems. "We conduct a scoring system when we block spam emails getting through to companies. Our system searches for keywords or common spam indicatiors. For instance, having many links and images in an email will tend to score you high spam points. However, sending attachments scores you low spam points. Not many spammers send attachments. Also, sending HTML only newsletters scores highly on our spam identification system, so it is best to send both text and HTML newsletters.
"Short titles with creative words also score high points on our spam detectors, because this is a pattern which spammers usually use."
Spam is estimated to reach 80 percent of all emails within three years, leading the Federal government to introduce penalties up to $220,000 for those who violate the new law.
Related Article: