Anti-spam legislation for system administrators

Introduction

Each country has its own anti-spam laws. As a result, many system administrators are confused about the laws that they need to use to find out whether emails sent to their organizations are spam or not. In general, they need to look at three things: the anti-spam laws of the countries where their organizations are based; the countries where the senders and the recipients of unsolicited emails reside; and the countries where the computer systems used for sending unsolicited emails are located. 

To facilitate system administrators in identifying spam, we will briefly explain the anti-spam requirements in the United States, the European Union, Canada and Australia. We intend to present this summary of the legislation in a non-legal way in order to enable non-lawyers (most system administrators) to understand it.

Security Awareness

The United States

The Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003 is a federal U.S. law that prohibits any person from sending unsolicited commercial emails unless the emails: (i) are clearly and conspicuously identified as a solicitation or an advertisement; (ii) include a notice to the recipient that informs them that they  can opt out from receiving unsolicited commercial emails; and (iii) include the postal address of the sender. 

System administrators need to comply with opt-out requests within ten business days. Besides, they are not allowed to make the opt-out conditional upon payments or other requirements (e.g., the provision of certain information).

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Companies that use the services of email marketing platforms may not need to take extensive measures to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act, as the compliance will usually be done by the operators of the platforms. Nevertheless, even if email marketing platforms are used, it is necessary to ensure that no unsolicited emails will be sent (Read more...)