New Zealand’s New Anti-Spam Act Fails to Check Rising Spam

Even as certain email vendors were recently pronouncing the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act to be a flop, a leading security expert and ISPs have a totally different perspective on the state of New Zealand's spam.

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act, which was implemented on 5 September 2007, declared that spammers would be penalized very heavily. However, the law just includes New Zealand and as per Inbox, a huge volume of spam originates from abroad.

As per Inbox's Jerry Flay, the whole purpose behind the conceptualization of this law, right from its amendment to its enactment as legislation, was to reduce the bulk of spam that impacts the New Zealanders, as per the nzherald.co.nz on1 October 2007. In this regard, it has failed completely.

Towards the end of September 2007, several receivers of a Fish and Game newssheet utilizing Xtra's poor and often-censured email service Bubble detected that it had been sucked by a spam filter together with Viagra discount advertisements and Nigerian currency frauds.

However, all these recipients had subscribed for the newssheet and had paid up for it as a portion of their license tax.

Several subscribers to these mailing lists have searched through overflowing unsolicited mailboxes to locate information that they have really asked for, while some found that the requested data hasn't even shown up.

But David Diprose, ihug's General Manager of Technology, alleges that the total bulk of spam being barred from reaching net users' email mailboxes is an optimistic signal of the Act being actually effective, informed nzherald.co.nz on 27 September 2007.

He appended that during the preceding month, a billion emails were dealt with and out of them, just 15 Million were 'uncontaminated', implying that their filters had obstructed about 985 Million junk emails and surely, this is a big figure.

He acknowledges that since the UEM Act is concentrated on checking New Zealand produced spam and safeguarding users, it has inadequate impact on the bulk of email that leaks through from abroad.

Flay proposed a whitepaper pact between ISPs, compounded with validation systems being set up, but Diprose can't comprehend it as being effective.

Related article: New Zealand Releases Code To Reduce Spam

» SPAMfighter News - 10/15/2007