Recently I have been involved with a group calling itself the Email Issues Forum. It’s a really interesting exercise getting together with all the different groups that are being affected by spam. While we all want to reduce the amount of spam, we all want to achieve it for different reasons:

Email Marketing Service Providers (such as MinervaMail)
We want to preserve the medium as a business communications environment. We also want clarity on what exactly is and isn’t spam so that we can communicate accurately with our clients. We want email recipients to understand what is and isn’t spam and what they need to do to reduce the amount they get.

Internet Service Providers (eg clearnet, xtra, maxnet)
They want to reduce the costs of handling the unwanted email (estimates of up to 70% of all email is unwanted). They want to contain the costs of having to filter mail and remove the obvious spam. They want email recipients to understand what is and isn’t spam and what they need to do to reduce the amount they get.

Ministry of Economic Development
Wants to control and reduce the nuisance factor affecting the public. The government also wants to avoid New Zealand becoming a source of international spam. There are also concerns about the issues of privacy and data collection.

The Direct Marketing Association and the Advertising Standards Association
These two organisations are keen to avoid complex legislative regulation that may make the problem worse instead of better. The are also keen to preserve the integrity of the medium for use by marketers. They understand that while self-regulation is effective at working with marketers whose intentions are reasonable, technical solutions are required to prevent the less ethical spam from getting through.

It is really exciting to be part of this group that is involved so directly with how spam will be controlled in the future.

However, what is even more exciting is to be able to see a common understanding of the problem starting to form. I feel really optimistic that we will in time see more and more email marketers getting it right and seeing their messages getting through to a warm response.

It does look likely that there will be some form of legislation around spam although this looks likely to be more at the technical end of things rather than the content end of things. As has been rightly pointed out there are plenty of existing laws around marketing content already together with extensive self-regulation by the ASA.

In Australia they have taken the approach of making it a legal requirement to comply with the Code of Practice. So pay attention to those Guiding Principles for Email Marketing!

I’ll keep you updated with developments as they progress.

Anna Curnow
Internet Strategies