[LINK] Five step guide to SPAM compliance from ACS

[Danny Yee]

Tom Worthington wrote:
> 1. GET PERMISSION IN THE FIRST INSTANCE
> When contacting any external person or organisation for the first time for 
> promotional purposes, either send a preliminary email seeking consent to 
> receiving promotional emails, 

ie, send spam asking for permission to spam.  This is just wrong.
If you don't have consent from the person to send them a particular
email, then you don't have consent to send them mail asking for that
consent, either.  Opt-out is NOT acceptable.

> (If an 
> individual gives you their business card, there is implied consent that 
> contact via the means listed on the business card is permitted.)

I disagree.  I would argue that there's an implied consent to personal
communications from the person to whom the card was given.  This would
NOT include consent to having an email address added to any kind of
automated list.

> Use should be made of signature or suffix functions in email applications 
> to attach contact details automatically to all outgoing email.
> 
> The ACS recommends the following postscript;
> 
> "If you do not wish to receive further emails from me please reply with 
> "Unsubscribe" in the Subject."
 
"Please reply with 'unsubscribe' in the Subject" is only going to
work with very small hand-maintained lists.  If you are running any
kind of serious mailing list, you should use proper list software --
and the user should have been given unsubscribe instructions when
they signed up.

> 4. IF YOUR EMAIL IS ON THE WEB, SAY "NO SPAM"
> 
> When email addresses are conspicuously displayed on a web-site, consider 
> adding a "no spam" tag to deter other parties from inferring your consent 
> to receiving unsolicited email.

Are you talking about obfuscation -- danny at NOSPAManatomy.usyd.edu.au
-- or just labelling -- danny at anatomy.usyd.edu.au (no spam)?  The
latter won't help with spammers and shouldn't be legally necessary.
The default assumption should always be that users have to explicitly
sign up to any mailing list.

> 5. IF THEY DON'T HAVE IT, THEY CAN'T USE IT
> 
> Consider whether you really want to include email addresses on business 
> cards, as this will typically imply your consent. ..."
 
Why is this?  (Not that I have a business card, anyway.)

Danny.
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