Strict New Anti-Spam Regulations In Canada

An anonymous reader writes "David Reese provides an interesting analysis of just how far Canada's new anti-spam legislation goes, and its implications for business. This may provide a valuable template for citizens of other countries, and may also encourage Canadians to prepare for the inevitable push-back from spammers. It is not clear from this analysis whether the legislation would affect telemarketing, but even if it does not it provides a useful precedent for future regulation in that area."

Comments

So what...

[Kinwolf]

I live in Canada, and we still get tons of spam, telemarketing phones calls on home line and cel phone. They simply come from the USA now. Country laws are useless when crime has no more frontier.

I'm Canadian

[ArcadeMan]

Any reply to this comment will be treated as unwanted spam.

Being Canadian, however, I feel the need to say that I'm sorry if my comment offended anyone.

Why would the spammers pay attention?

[Kenja]

There are tons of regulations etc against spam in many countries. Guess what? The people running the spam/scan email systems simply do not care. There is zero enforcement of these rules, so why should adding more regulations make any difference?

Be careful with unsubscribe links!

[Khopesh]

Hi. I'm in the anti-spam business. You got lucky.

A lot of spammers use fake unsubscribe links as a way of verifying your address and the fact that you read the message. Some questionable businesses have verification elements to their unsubscribe links that will note the fact that you visited the site but then due to a bug fail to process your unsubscribe attempt (thus netting the same effect).

I will sometimes unsubscribe from things, but that's because I want to see how successful it was (and I can deal with the trouble caused by attracting more spam). I do not suggest this for others. Use sites like myWOT to research the link before trusting it enough to follow it and perform the request. Use sites like SpamCop and KnujOn (and, if you're in France, Signal Spam, which has legal enforcement power) to report anything else as spam. All of those reporting agencies are tied to actual enforcement (in some way; KnujOn busts registrars, SpamCop informs network operators (and builds its blocklist), Signal Spam prosecutes if in France).