North Coast Connections

Anyway, Hong Kong passed a new law in 2007 regulating email notices, so they sent me this notice in English and Chinese ...

The Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance (UEMO) (Cap. 593) and the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Regulation (UEMR) were enacted in 2007. The UEMO regulates the sending of "commercial electronic messages" with a "Hong Kong link". In this regard, we would like to seek your explicit consent to continuously subscribe to our Service, i.e. to receive our emails on tender information. Grateful if you can reply us with the attached form duly filled on or before 31 March 2008, please.

In other words, in order to continue receiving subscription email notices, I have to "consent" in writing. Hmm ... this means that anyone with a Hong Kong e-address operating a listserv, email newsletter subscription, or even a blogger's auto-notification when comments are posted have to first "consent" to receiving emails. How awkward.

Of course, their intent is good. Spam is a MAJOR problem with a VERY high price tag to individuals and business. This particular law attempts to regulate email, phone calls (do not call lists), unsolicited faxes, instant messages and even text messages. However, regulations that cause government agencies to have to re-subscribe those who affirmatively signed up to receive listserv email notices seems a bit onerous to me.

I am subscribed to a dozen or more email lists. Only two send out a periodic ping advising subscribers that they are subscribed to the list (duh). Ironically, these notices end up in my spam filter where I ignore them. Again, it seems rather dumb to me.

As long as mass email blasts have an unsubscribe feature, I think there is no need to handcuff the originators by requiring more than the original act of subscribing. If these blasts are spam (unsolicited advertising), I learned long ago NOT to use the unsubscribe feature because too many spammers use this to verify that yours is a valid email address and then either sell you to another spammer, send you more junk, or both.

These regulations, as well intended as they may be, provide a justification for the pulling of information instead of the pushing. For instance, blog and RSS feeds get around these regulatory problems by offering technology that allows the user to pull content into a browser instead of pushing content into someone's email box. At first, I found this clunky and had to use a third party feed reading software, but now the Firefox browser allows you to easily subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds and merely click on each to find its content.

So go ahead and complain about unwanted spam ... just be careful that the regulated solutions may not solve the problem and may even cause a few problems of their own.

Chris Crawford
www.justiceserved.com

Photo credit = Hormel Foods