Spamhuntress

I met Anna Vlasova from Kaspersky labs when I went to Holland for the Spam Symposium earlier this year. She was talking about a new law going into effect this summer, so I asked her for a breakdown. She has allowed me to post her e-mail text here, for all of you to read:

Yes, now we have new version of some law articles (valid from july 2006), but it is not ’spam law’. It regulates advertising process, so it covers only some part of the e-mail spam. But in Russia most of e-mail spam is advertising.

In the latest version of the law, the following points are of crucial importance:

1. The introduction of the concept of ‘advertising distributed via electronic networks’. This means that the law applies to advertising sent via email, and spam which is of an advertising nature will be covered by this law. The word ’spam’ itself is not used in the law.

2. The law also legislates the ‘opt-in’ principle (i.e. preliminary agreement to receive messages, or a subscription to messages).

3. It is assumed that an agreement to receive such messages does not exist, i.e. the originator of a mailing (for instance, a spammer) will have to show that the user agreed to receive advertising. Otherwise the advertising will be viewed as not in accordance with the law.

4. Automatic mailings are prohibited. It’s true that the law talks about prohibiting the use of tools which work ‘without human participation’. In such cases, it will be difficult to demonstrate that spam is sent fully automatically.

Here is a comment on the new law:
http://www.spamtest.ru/document.html?pubid=183916209&context=9562

and here is text of the new law (article 18 covers ‘advertising distributed via electronic networks): http://www.brandfabrica.ru/law/adv/ In russian the title of Article 18 is ‘’Статья 18. Реклама, распространяемая по сетям электросвязи и размещаемая на почтовых отправлениях .

This entry was posted on Wednesday, September 13th, 2006 at 9:38 am and is filed under Mail spam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.