01 April 2003

Latest Anti-Spam Developments

As ethical email marketers, bigmouthmedia are working at the forefront of developing 100% permission based email marketing campaigns for our clients. We have been keeping a close eye on all of the impending legislation surrounding the European member states, more specifically Directive 2002/58/EC which is due to be implemented Europe-wide by the end of October this year. In a nutshell, this directive means commercial email in the European Economic Area will no longer be allowed without gaining the recipients' prior consent.

The first UK proposals for implementation were put forward by Stephen Timms, e-commerce minister for the DTI, at the end of last week. However, scepticism has already been aired as to how easy the laws are going to be to enforce. Robert Dirskovski, head of the interactive media division at the Direct Marketing Association (DMA) believes that complaints are going to be "quite high" as a result of consumers forgetting that they gave their details to company X or Y. Essentially this will mean that companies who are adhering to the legislation could be blacklisted and even fined as consumers become more aggressive in their reactions to spam.

Nevertheless, due to the relatively broad wording used in the directive, some member states are being more stringent than others. The consensus this far would appear to suggest that the UK Government will take a more industry-friendly attitude than others.

If you want to know if your contact database can still be used legitimately, how you can build a permission based list from scratch or how bigmouthmedia can help you launch a targeted and measurable opt-in e-marketing campaign then don't hesitate to drop us a line.

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