Saturday 28 May 2011

Time for Anti Spam legislation in Brunei?

Lately I have been receiving email as part of a bulk email sender's list. This included a restaurant touting its newly renovated premises, a telco promoting a product and a hotel selling king sized juicy T-bone steaks.

While I love steaks and am grateful for the information about the product update from the telco, I have never been a patron at the restaurant that sent that mass email. What's worse, the sender did not know about the undisclosed recipients feature resulting in everybody's email being published to everyone else in the mailing list. What's stopping anyone on that list copying those emails and sending other useless information to me and everyone else on that list?

Which brings me to the need for Anti-Spam legislation. Such legislation makes it an offence to send out unsolicited emails. The same legislation will make it compulsory for bulk email senders to give a choice of opting out of the mailing list.

Telcos and service providers are usually the main opponents to such law because of the duties placed on them to ensure that their services do not facilitate the sendng of unsolicited emails.

Nevertheless, I think it's time for such law and time to see the end of spam.

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