I found this little article in the Guardian Unlimited today, and I thought it might interest everyone who has ever had the joy of spam.....
Persistent email spammers could face unlimited fines under new legislation announced by the government yesterday.
From December organisations will need prior consent to send unsolicited emails to individual users, although sending messages to company email addresses will be exempt from the law.
The legislation has been welcomed by companies, who see it as the first step in the fight against the many millions of unwanted messages that clog up email servers around the country.
But anti-spam campaigners said the new laws would make little difference to individual users and will effectively legalise the spamming of company email addresses.
Spam, defined in the legislation as "unsolicited email sent without the consent of the addressee and without any attempt at targeting recipients who are likely to be interested in its contents", has been growing exponentially over the past few years. Brightmail, a company that produces filtering software for internet service providers, estimates that up to 50% of global email traffic last month was spam, compared with 8% two years ago.
The new legislation means that unsolicited emails or mobile phone text messages cannot be sent to users without their prior agreement or unless there is an existing customer relationship.
Any organisation in breach of these terms can be reported to the office of the information commissioner, which has powers to then take the organisation to the courts. In the first instance, magistrates can levy fines of up to
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