AUSTRALIAN SPAM LAWS

The penalties? Up to $220,000 for a single day's contraventions, or up to $1.1 million for ongoing breaches.

The Australian Anti-Spam legislation came into effect in April 2004. Here's how it will affects sending email of a Marketing nature.

The legislation covers emails of a commercial nature. It is illegal to send someone a commercial email unless you know that the person has consented to receiving it.

The legislation does say that consent can be implied. This could generally mean, for example, that if you already have a business relationship with the receiver, that it could be implied that they would be OK to receive emails from you.

Another situation of implied consent would be when someone has subscribed to your email newsletter. There could be other situations where consent could be implied, but you really do need to be extremely careful, when sending an email to someone "unannounced", and with whom you have no dealings with.

The legislation also goes further to say that all emails of a commercial nature must have the following:

• Accurate information about who the sender is (i.e. you can't pretend to be sending from someone else).
• A functional way for the recipient to unsubscribe.
• The legislation also make’s it illegal to "harvest" emails off the Internet, or to purchase email lists that have been obtained in that way.