[plug] [OT] Australian Spam Act

[Simon Newton]

Morning all,

I was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me. The story is
as follows:

Yesterday I received a spam from a business within Australia (PO Box is
listed as Northbridge, and their telephone number indicates they're in
Perth). The account the message came in on is hardly used, in the last 2
years I've sent 10 emails from it. The only reason it's one of my
Evolution accounts is that certain forums at Uni block all email not
from at UWA addresses. So that's 10 instances of it being on webpages
(which doesn't munge emails addresses) and one instance listed in the
UWA student database.

Anyway, I called up the company to talk to them about it, the phone
number was connected to an answering machine, so I left a message. A
while later I got a call back from a guy who asked what the problem was.
I explained the situation and asked about the Spam Act of 2003. His
responses were:

He claimed he was in daily contact with the ACA about the spam laws (no
doubt due to the number of complaints again him)

He told me that if my address was in their database before the 10th
April 2003, the laws did not apply. (I can find no mention of this on
the ACA pages)

He also told me that because it contains a working unsubscribe link and
the identity of the sender, it is not classed as spam.

I told him about the fact that the email was only listed on a handful of
websites and that they were obviously using a screen scraper of some
sort and his response was "oh, you wouldn't believe where email
addresses are on the internet".

I looked at the ACA pages (
http://www.aca.gov.au/consumer_info/spam/consumerinformation.htm#How )
and to be classed as spam the message has to fail one of the following
tests:

* Consent - either express consent, or consent may be inferred from your
conduct and ‘existing business or other relationships’

* Identify - it must contain accurate information about the person or
organisation that authorised the sending of the message

* Unsubscribe - it must contain a functional ‘unsubscribe’ facility to
allow you to opt out from receiving messages from that source in the
future

Obviously they are safe on the latter two, I'd really like to know what
"inferred consent" implies. My guess is that its up to a judge to
decide.

Anyway I've lodged a complaint with the ACA, with the number of
complaints they must receive everyday, I doubt it will amount to
anything though.

My feeling is that if the company is willing to put its contact details
and ABN on the email either they're extremely stupid, or confident that
they are within the law.

Simon N