Singaporean SPAM Control Bill makes life more exciting
I have just quickly browsed over the Singaporean SPAM Control Bill which was passed by the Singapore Parliament on the 12th April 2007 and it makes for interesting reading (if of course you like reading this kind of stuff).
Here are the most interesting points for me when I reflect on the NZ Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act.
- Like the CAN-SPAM the Singaporean SPAM Control Bill supports the Opt-out model where you can send one commercial email without consent.
- One-to-one commercial based emails do not trigger the Act only bulk email. The Bill provides the watermarks for what is considered “Bulk”. This is a far cry from the NZ SPAM Act which is triggered by even one-to-one email communication which will be a big headache for NZ businesses. To this day I have no idea why the government decided to add this in. If anyone in government is reading this please contact me as I can relay to you how our own clients are trying to come to terms with this additional overhead to their already bloated processes.
- The bummer thing for the Singaporean people is the Act relies only on consumers to engage in civil lawsuits against people and businesses who are deemed to be spamming. How many Singaporean’s could afford to take someone or some business to court or who has the time?
- But by far the most interesting requirement of the Act is that all Singaporean senders must add the following tag to all unsolicited bulk emails “<ADV>” (quotes not included). It can be in the subject line or within the body of the message. Now as an ESP in order to help our customers comply Mobilize Mail would implement a tool that would automatically add this tag into the emails going out if it is not already present. I think it’s a cool idea!
In summary as I have said before the bulk of the SPAM in the world today comes from 200 core spammers of which 80% of them reside in the USA. This Act will not stop the bulk of the SPAM but merely add additional overhead to ethical and legitimate businesses trying to make a buck in this world.
Why do we still receive SPAM? Well its because, and this really blows me away, there are still a lot of people buying goods and services off spammers and there is enough of them for the spammers to make quite a bit of money.
Maybe government should focus more of warning people not to buy off spammers instead of focusing on creating policy that adds headaches to business. But then again who has the right to tell you how to spend your money?
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