FTC to crack down on Spam Mail

Sending e-mail without permission from the recipient is now a punishable offense.

The Fair Trade Commission (FTC) said on August 20 that a regulation prohibiting Internet shopping malls from sending advertisements through e-mail, also known as spam mail, without permission from recipients will be included in e-commerce consumer protection laws to be introduced in the National Assembly this fall. Authorities will close down Internet shopping malls that send spam mail to non-subscribers and impose other penalties.

Internet users are currently wary of advertisements mass-mailed by Internet businesses and other e-mail proxy agents, which can often disrupt operations or in severe cases cause computer systems to crash.

The FTC stipulated that online businesses must ask whether recipients want to subscribe to commercial e-mail in their initial e-mail inquiries and are banned from sending further spam mail to unwilling customers.

But businesses can forward spam mail limited to 30 kilobites in size, which amounts to about 30 A4 sized-pages of text, once per week or month when the recipient fails to reply.

The regulations are applicable to off-line businesses dispatching spam mail as well.

The FTC plans to take legal measures, such as fines and suspension of operations, against non-abiding firms. The FTC said that the regulations will take effect early next year after a grace period.