In light of the fact that spam is costing South African companies between R7 billion and R13.1 billion a year, as revealed at the Spam Summit held in Johannesburg last Wednesday, a draft set of guidelines for the commercial use of e-mail was tabled for discussion.
These guidelines will form the basis of a green paper process to arrive at an industry-approved code of conduct for commercial e-mail usage, to be administered by the Marketing Federation of South Africa. This will function along the same lines as the SMS code, which governs the local use of SMS marketing.
The guidelines, which provide a working definition of spam, bar e-mail senders from sending any spam at all. They clarify that for an e-mail to be acceptable, it must include clear details of the sender, valid return addresses and an explanation of why the recipient is receiving the mail. It also clarifies how the unsubscribe process should function.
A copy of these guidelines is available here.
Although this code won`t be effective against international spammers, Michael Judin, senior partner at Goldman Judin Maisels and one of the delegates at the summit, feels it will be an effective regulator of local spam, in much the same way as a code of conduct regulates the advertising industry.
"The Advertising Authority self-regulates one of SA`s most dynamic industries with a living, breathing code that is updated on an annual basis," he says. "This has set a very good precedent for self-regulation, and I believe that in this way, we could have positive and informative control of spam."
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