Anti-Spam Legislation

[dogwomble]

Hey guys,

I know I can't get any specific legal advice from here, but I thought I could get at least a basic idea from you guys.

IIRC, the government has brought in fairly strict anti-spam legislation. Now, I run my own website/forum, and one of the fellow admins suggested that to try and get some of the older members back whp haven't logged in in a while, we should send out a bulk email to all of them reminding them of the site's existance.

Now, given that I haven't specifically got them to agree to me sending out such bulk emails, what is the legal situation surrounding this?

Cheers!!

[eeefreak]

imho very tenuous

[amj]

Jesus, surely 1 email explaing the situation wouldn't land you in the shit. Maybe Australian's are a bunch of tight arses like you said but it sounds a bit OTT from my point of view.

[Natfu]

Not legal advice, just general advice. If you do send out a notice, ensure that you allow people to opt-out.

[Sanura]

Perhaps something along the line of 'because you haven't participated in the forums in X amount of time, we thought it might be a good idea to remind you of your subscription to the site. This is a once off reminder to let you know that 'such and such a site' is still here and going strong, and we would love for you to become more active with the forums, or suggest what we may improve upon to make our services more desirable to you. If, however, you would perfer us to remove you from the members list, please reply to this e-mail with the subject line 'remove' and this will be done as quickly as possible. Thankyou for your participation in the past, and we hope to see you on the site again soon!' or whatever text you want. If they have signed up to your site with an e-mail address, I am not sure what the word of the law is, but I am guessing that by doing so they have authorised one off e-mails about their account to be sent to them. I don't think that one e-mail is going to cause people to get up in arms, especially since they did sign up to the site/service... though ya never know ;)

[SmaSheD_CoW]

I know it's a late reply, but you're fine. The Spam Act only applies to commercial messages - unless you're directly trying to sell them something, you've got nothing to worry about.

If you did want to send out a commercial message, you would need to show that they consented to receiving messages from you, that you identified yourself/your company in the email, and that you provided an unsubscribe mechanism. The only potential problem would be with the first requirement, but as Sanura suggested, it might be arguable that signing up with a valid email address implied consent.

[Looney_Tunes67]

Hey guys,

I know I can't get any specific legal advice from here, but I thought I could get at least a basic idea from you guys.

IIRC, the government has brought in fairly strict anti-spam legislation. Now, I run my own website/forum, and one of the fellow admins suggested that to try and get some of the older members back whp haven't logged in in a while, we should send out a bulk email to all of them reminding them of the site's existance.

Now, given that I haven't specifically got them to agree to me sending out such bulk emails, what is the legal situation surrounding this?

Cheers!!

If you want to make sure you are covered then check out the Spam Act here

http://www.acma.gov.au/acmainterwr/telcomm/industry_codes/codes/iia%20spam%20code%20dec%202005.pdf

Hope it helps