The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act comes into force on 5 September 2007 and effects every business in New Zealand that sends email.
Here’s my summary, but if in doubt read the Act yourself!
The new law says:
- Before sending “commercial electronic messages”, you must get consent from all recipients
- All “commercial electronic messages” must provide a working unsubscribe facility
- The sender of all “commercial electronic messages” must be clearly identified and contact information must be available
- Harvesting emails is illegal
The definition of “commercial electronic messages” is a catch-all for email, SMS and instant messages (but not POTS, VOIP or FAX) where the primary purpose is to market or promote goods, services or business/investment opportunities.
There are exceptions of course – which pretty much apply to most day-to-day business email:
- If you are already doing business with someone, you are allowed to email them.
- If someone gives you their business card, or if you find a contact email address on a website you can email them (unless there is a ‘no spam’ notice with the email address).
- If someone asks for a quote, you can email it to them.
- You can let people know about their subscription or account, or renewal of a product.
- You can email people about upgrades to products/services that they have bought.
If you want to send email newsletters, offers, promotions etc – you should keep a double-opt-in database using a system such as Calcium Software’s Hot Prospect. Hot Prospect v3 was recently released and there are some good reasons for using it:
Save time - Hot Prospect will automatically manage double-opt-ins, unsubscribes and bounces, allowing you to collect email addresses from your website, or from offline and comply with the law. Sending email campaigns is fast and safe. Using Hot Prospect you can build a great looking email in minutes and know that it will only be sent to the people on your list who are currently opted-in.
Repudation - the Act states that the onus of proof lies with the sender. Hot Prospect provides full repudation by keeping an audit record of recipients being added and removed from mailing lists, including opt-in confirmations, changes of information and details of emails sent.
Results - its one thing to be allowed to send a marketing email, its another thing to be able to deliver the email through spam filters. The SMTP engine behind Hot Prospect is mailPrimer, which was designed to deliver daily 1-1 emails and therefore uses a number of unique techniques for optimising delivery. When used to deliver bulk email, mailPrimer gets the highest delivery rates that I’ve seen.
For more information on Hot Prospect, have a look at: Calcium, Red Running Man, Green Running Man
24 July 2007 at 6:39 pm |
[...] vote for the trees by sending an email to your friends from the site. All in accordance with the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act 2007 of [...]
24 August 2007 at 10:23 am |
Is anti spam legislation anti business?
http://www.antispam.govt.nz/
Firms ‘overreact’ to spam act
29 August 2007 at 10:23 am |
I think anti spam is the best thing since the usb flash drive.
In many instances I have done a once off dealing with a business and may never deal with them again for whatever reason.
I dont believe this should be a ticket to bypass the anti spam law.
If my business requires anything there is more than enough resources to locate it on the web. This gives the consumer the choice.
I would love to email millions of prospective clients with the intention growing the business.
I personally turn down this opportunity just on the basis that I hate it when may need to retrieve mail remotely for an important email I may have been sent regarding facets of my business of the deal that I’m working on.
The time wasted to retrieve all the mail so you can get the one you need if you add up each time this happens in a year is phenominal.
This is counter productive as in business “time is money”