Spam
Spam and Unsolicited Promotional Email
Legitimate and targeted use of email can be an effective way to market products and services. However, some email users are sending spam – bulk unsolicited email that contravenes the law.
Legislation regarding commercial use of email
Various laws relate to the bulk dissemination of promotional email. The Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive has superseded these laws.
This directive makes the privacy rules that apply to phone and fax services applicable to email and use of the Internet. The Directive sets conditions on the use of traffic, location and subscriber data and regulates the use of communications networks for unsolicited direct marketing by phone, fax, email and SMS.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive clarifies how companies can use mass dissemination of email. Sending bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE) is prohibited, with limited exceptions. Companies can send UCE to customers and selected users that have consented to receive the information. However the company must enable the recipients to opt-out of any future unsolicited communications.
The Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive is due to be incorporated into UK law by October 2003.
Promotional Email
Companies have a right to use email to market their services as long as they act responsibly and within the law. Companies can send email to customers and selected users that have consented to receive such information. If users do not select to ‘opt out’ of receiving further information when completing an online form, this can be deemed to be consent. Any promotional emails and their subject headers must not mislead and must be immediately obvious to the recipient that they are promotional messages. Communications should clearly identify the sender and ways to communicate with them. The sender must also provide an opportunity for recipients to refuse further communications and must act promptly on any such requests.
Spam
ISPA defines spam as illegal bulk unsolicited email. Spam messages are usually commercial in nature, often containing sales promotions, "get rich quick" schemes and product information. Spam can be irritating, criminally fraudulent, sometimes obscene or offensive and is very time consuming for recipients to download and work through.
Recipients of spam are often unaware that their email addresses have been ‘harvested’ by a spammer. Harvesting of email addresses can be performed by using software, by purchasing illegally compiled databases of addresses, by scanning newsgroup postings or by simply manually collecting email addresses that users may post on websites. Spammers also create lists by trying every combination of letters and numbers possible in the chance of hitting "live" email addresses, known as “dictionary attacks”.
ISPA opposes the sending of emails without due regard for applicable law or in contravention of a service provider’s terms and conditions.
Spam saps ISPs’ valuable bandwidth, can compromise the integrity of a network and affects the performance of mail servers. Combating spam costs ISPs very significant amounts of time and money.
Perceptions of spam
The growth of spam has meant that many people consider a large amount of legitimate email to be spam. This has caused serious detriment to the commercial use of email. A survey of UK IT directors and managers by an ISPA member in 2002 highlighted the problem.
Asked what constitutes spam, 90 per cent of respondents said it was promotional or marketing email from someone they didn’t know, 89 per cent that it was an email containing information clearly irrelevant to their work, 81 per cent said it was news or information from someone they didn’t know and 71 per cent considered it to be an email they didn’t request, regardless of content or sender.
Promotional emails from organisations known to the recipient were not regarded as spam by 71 per cent of respondents.
Such sentiments have encouraged many companies to only send promotional email to people that already have an ongoing relationship with their organization. They operate strict opt-in policies. They also ensure that their online forms include opt-in tick boxes rather than opt-out boxes and they do not pre-select the opt-in box. When a subscriber requests to unsubscribe from the list, their address is immediately removed from the list.
Combating spam
There are a number of steps users can take to reduce the amount of spam they receive. They should not respond to promotional messages from organisations that they have never had contact with as this may simply indicate to spammers that the user’s email address is ‘live’. They should not post their email addresses on public areas of the Internet, or if they must, they should not use their main email address. Instead they should use a different address with the knowledge that it is likely to receive spam.
To limit spam, users should install filtering software or turn on the spam filtering tools that their ISP may supply.
Many ISP’s offer advice about limiting and reporting spam on their website including how to view the full headers of the received email. These full headers may show the path that the message has taken from the sender to the recipient and so may indicate which ISP was used to send the email. If users can identify the ISP of the spammer, they should complain to the spammer’s ISP.
Most ISPs have reporting mechanisms for users who are the recipients of email abuse, including spam that originates from one of their users. This often takes the form of a specific ‘abuse@’ email address which can be found on their website.
ISPA advises its members to follow industry best practice and ensure that they require their users to abide by an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) that includes agreeing not to use the ISP's services to send or support spam.
ISPA believes these self-regulatory measures should be backed-up by effective law enabling action to be taken against persistent spammers.
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Notes to Editors
For further information, please contact the ISPA press office. Email: pressoffice@ispa.org.uk Tel: 020 7340 4535
The Internet Services Providers’ Association (ISPA) was established in 1995 as a trade association to represent providers of Internet services (ISPs) in the UK. ISPA promotes competition, self-regulation and the development of the Internet industry. For a list of members or other information about ISPA, please consult the website: http://www.ispa.org.uk