Australia's Spam Act of 2003 prohibits the sending of unsolicited commercial electronic messages. The legislation covers all messages originating from Australia and all messages targeting an Australian address.
All emails must include contact information and clear identification of the sender. They must also include a functional unsubscribe facility, and the functionality must work for up to 30 days after the original message was sent. All requests must be honoured within 5 working days.
Emails can only be sent if the account holder (for example, the person who owns the email) has given permission. Permission can be given directly or, in limited circumstances, through implied consent.
- Express permission: when an individual agrees to receive your marketing. For example, a person may sign up to your mailing list.
- Inferred permission: you may be able to infer permission from an individual's conduct, business or other relationships. This is a broad definition but an example would be sending a message advertising your employment agency to the recruitment manager at a business, if their email has been published online (and you didn't scrape it!).
You cannot use harvested or scraped lists in Australia. Under the spam legislation, you can't use a list that has been created using a web scraper or sell email address scraping software.
Some organisations are exempt from the legislation. These include registered charities, educational institutions (only when sent to current or former students), government bodies and registered political parties. These messages must relate to goods or services offered by the exempt organisation.
According to the ACMA, “the penalty units referred to in the Spam Act are currently equal to $180 each. For example, the penalty under section 25(5)(b) of the Spam Act for a company with a previous record of spamming and who sent two or more spam messages on a given day without consent is a maximum fine of 10,000 penalty units. This equates to a maximum penalty of $1,800,000 per day.”