Oxygen Mail Centre

Australia has some of the strongest anti-spam legislation in the world, so it is important businesses clearly understand the limitations of email marketing.

The Spam Act 2003 was released by the Department of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts (DCITA) to combat the growing amount of nuisance email. The Australian GOvernment also released useful guides to assist business in developing compliant campaigns.

The Spam Act 2003 - A Practical Guide for Business

What is ‘spam’? - A definition

Many businesses and consumers come unstuck due to misunderstanding what constitutes spam. Spam has become such a popular way of describing any unexpected email that confusion surrounds what is often a legitimate use of email marketing.

The Spam Act defines spam as “unsolicited commercial electronic messaging”. This includes email, SMS, instant messaging and other popular forms of mobile phone messaging. It does not cover normal telephone contact - telemarketing does not fall under thedefinition of spam.

A commercial message covers any message that either containes a commercial proposition or directs the recipient to a site where a commercial transaction can be undertaken. This means your email may seem entirely innocent, but if it directs the reader to a commercial site - even without any direct sales pitch - it falls under the definition of commercial messaging.

What is not contained in the definition of spam is any suggestion of bulk. Ten thousand emails can be sent at once quite legitimately while another single email can be identified as spam if it is commercial in nature and the recipient perceives it as unsolicited.

Therefore, the key to avoiding accusations of spam is to ensure all recipients have supplied consent, compliant with the act.

Express and Inferred Consent

There are two forms of consent defined within the Act – express and inferred. Express covers the instances where there is a clear indication that the recipient has requested to receive the emails to a specific address. Inferred consent is based on the existing relationship between a business and a customer as well as customer behaviour.

Express consent is easy to define. A customer specifically ticks a box or types in an email address in the clear expectation of receiving email communications. Sometimes this can sit on the website as an open invitation. Sometimes it can be a tick box within the checkout process. Either way, the customer is under no illusions that they have chosen to take this option.

Inferred consent covers those situations where there is an expectation of further email contact, even if it hasn't explicitly been stated. For example, if a consumer enters their email online as part of a transaction or in registering a product or warranty, the assumption is that there will be some email contact. The nature of that additional contact is usually outlined on the site, sometimes within the Terms and Conditions, suggesting that the email address may be used for additional communications. Human reality is that not everyone reads the Terms and Conditions when they tick the box on a website, but that doesn't mean consent hasn't been given. The downside of this approach is that consumers may not be aware of what they have agreed to and may not understand that your email campaign is not spam when it turns up in their inbox.

But, if there is already an ongoing email relationship between you and your customer, for example through day-to-day transactions related to their account, the relationship has been established sufficiently to infer consent.

How Spam is Identified

On average, 20% of legitimate emails are mistaken as spam (source: Return Path, ResenderStudy_101206 Research Brief 2006).

There are a number of factors involved with the identification of spam, but usually they revolve around authentication. For example; online email hosts, such as Yahoo Mail and Hotmail, use certain tools to authenticate all incoming mail. These include SenderID, SNDS, SPF Records and Domain Keys. For example, by tagging emails with SenderID, the Hotmail servers can clearly identify the source and thereby trusts the email is legitimate. Without a SenderID tag, Hotmail will assume the email is spam and either block it or push it into junk mail folders.

Online email accounts also build feedback on emails to determine reputation through their ‘Junk’ or ‘Spam’ buttons in the toolbar. Many online users assume that by using these buttons, they are unsubscribing from the offending email list, but this is not the case. All these buttons do is raise a flag with the email ISP. If enough flags are raised, future emails from that address will become blocked as spam.

This means the onus is on the email marketer to take the reports of spam abuse seriously and remove those addresses from the list promptly. If you continue to send emails to people who identified your previous emails as spam, you are guaranteed to provoke enough red flags to get you blocked by the ISP.

For other Australian ISPs, such as BigPond, Optus, Primus and TPG, your reputation is influenced by the relationships you maintain with the providers. By taking notice of their particular guidelines and recommendations, and responding promptly to issues, you can avoid losing large chunks of your readership.

Thankfully, Oxygen Mail Centre automatically tags your email campaigns with the relevant authentication data to reduce the risk of your emails becoming blocked by ISPs as spam. Using Oxygen Mail Centre provides a far higher protection against unwarranted accusations of spam.

Penalties

With fines of up to $1.1 million dollars, it is very important to ensure the email marketing strategy you employ avoids being identified as spam.

Sometimes, email campaigns can become blocked by the filters of certain internet service providers (ISPs) and this can land all campaigns originating from Oxygen Mail Centre on a ‘spam’ list. This is why we require all users of Oxygen Mail Centre to take every precaution to prevent their campaign from breaching spam legislation.

Should your campaign cause Oxygen Mail Centre to be added to a spam register, Netregistry will need to pay fees to remove ourselves and to prevent the similar failure of all other client campaigns. This can be costly, time consuming and - above all - inconvenient to all other email campaigns held-up or blocked during this period. Therefore, to cover us should we ever need to remove our campaigns from these ‘blacklists’, any client account that causes Oxygen Mail Centre to become blacklisted will be charged a flat rate of $1000 and suspended from the service. This fee is not negotiable and cannot be disputed. The ISP decision in all such cases is final and we are held to account even if you feel your campaign should not have been blocked.

Unsubscribing

One major feature required under the Spam Act 2003 is the inclusion of an efficient ‘unsubscribe’ facility. Without a convenient and simple unsubscribe feature, your email may contravene the act.

Within the Act, webmasters are expected to process all unsubscribe requests within five working days. Beyond this, any further emails to the specific email address constitute spam and can carry fines.

Oxygen Mail Centre automatically processes your unsubscribe requests on your behalf, cleaning your data. If one of your recipients clicks on the unsubscribe link, they will be taken through a simple process that quickly and easily removes their email from your database without you needing to do anything. This prevents the risk of error and gives you peace of mind that your email list is always spam free.