Australian Spam Act 2003 - Part 1 - Introduction
We spend a lot of time advising on best practice for our many clients who use our email marketing services, but for those of us in Australia, we happen to be the beneficiaries of some of the most progressive (and strict!) spam legislation in the world, so it’s worth getting to know and ensuring that your campaigns are conforming with some reasonable rules.
Please note I am NOT a lawyer and my writings do not constitute legal counsel of any kind. But hopefully I can present some good information and links to relevant law to help you in formulating your companies SPAM policy. There’s a lot to digest, so I’m going to break it down into this introduction and three bite-size chunks for you to get your heads around over the next month or so.
Now if you’re feeling keen, the Australian government has produced a helpful document called “Spam Act 2003: A Practical Guide for Business”. It’s an invigorating read and if you want to dig deeper it’s a good place to start. However, I’ve read it, chewed it, thought about it and have emerged victorious. So let’s start at the bottom, what is ‘SPAM’ according to the Aussie pollies?
According to the SPAM Act, SPAM is, ‘unsolicited commercial electronic messaging’, and can be a single message sent via Instant Messaging (IM), SMS, other mobile phone messaging (MMS for example) or email. What isn’t covered is non-electronic matter, voice phone calls, pop up windows (sadly) and ‘Messages without any commercial content that do not contain links or directions to a commercial website or location’ (Spam Act 2003: A Practical Guide for Business: 4). For the messages to covered by the law they must either a) originate in Australia or b) contain and Australian link.
Address harvesting software or addresses gained from this type of software must also never be
used. Ever. Ever Ever Ever.
Some of the penalties which might interested you are: A single day of contraventions of the law can result in a fine of $220 000 and multiple breaches can lead to exposure to 1.1 million of fines. So if you’re planning on being caught you better have extra close ties to the Nigerian government and the hidden money of which you are the only beneficiary.
Back to business, how does one work to ensure complicity and avoid legal action and ensure your sending facility isn’t blacklisted through poor practice? There are three primary areas where a business needs to take care and I’m going to give a brief overview as best I can. Again, I recommend taking a look at the government’s document and also other relevant information on the Department of Broadband, Communications and the Digital Economy’s website. The three areas are:
- Consent
- Identify
- Unsubscribe
We’re going to look at each of these in a little more detail in the coming days, but so that I can leave you with something practical here are two quick points on what a message must contain by law.
- Accurate information about the sender of the message
- A functional way for the message’s recipients to indicate that they do not wish to receive such messages in the future – that they wish to unsubscribe.
So, easy. If know your list is clean and not sure about what actually has to be in the email to satisfy your legal requirements, just make sure you have accurate and legitimate contact information regarding your business and a way for the recipient to opt out. Easy! But don’t get too excited about your awesome fulfillment of these two simple directives, we’ve got the big three areas in SPAM law to come. Stay tuned!
~Rob :)
August 11th, 2008 at 4:36 pm
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