UCE Fallout - Newsletter/Mailing List Confirmations are SPAM?

Posted by Cliff on Monday December 16, 2002 @09:41PM from the even-innocent-communication-is-now-suspect dept.

battlemage asks: "According to this Article [heise.de; Google translation - pretty unreadable], a german court decided on 9/19/02 that the common confirmation E-Mails sent to new subscribers of newsletters could be considered unsolicited e-mail, aka SPAM, if they are sent to somebody who did not actually subscribe. According to German laws, this could actually mean fines for the site running the newsletter. They said it was the site owners obligation to prove that somebody actually requested such e-mail. The question is, how would that be possible without e-mail and without cost-intensive Passport/ID/CreditCard-Checks? I do work on a website in my free-time, and we would probably like to offer newsletters in the future, but I'm now unsure how we could do that." Mailing list and newsletter admins in other countries might do well to keep an eye on this in case such laws migrate to their area.

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Re:Just to put this clear... by beebware · 2002-12-17 02:21 · Score: 4, Interesting

But surley the site operator had the subscribers IP address as well? I know a few times when I've joined mailing lists via the web, I've received an email along the lines "A request was made at xx-xxx-xx xx:xx:xx from IP address xx.xx.xx.xx to subscribe you to this mailing list. To confirm your subscription, please reply to this mail or click this link. If this subscription is in error, you do not need to do anything".

This way both parties have knowledge of who attempted the sign up: if the email account owner claims the message is spam, then at least the mail-admin has got a third-party to blame.