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What is the legal definition of spam and what are the penalties?
by Stephane
Spam and the Law for Confidence in the Digital Economy
First of all, contrary to popular belief, spam is not necessarily the repeated sending of unsolicited e-mails. Indeed, some e-mailing companies legally purchase e-mail addresses in order to send legitimate advertising e-mails. Spam is therefore emails that do not comply with France’s LEN law (Loi pour la Confiance dans l’Economie Numérique).
According to this law, there are two basic rules for sending prospecting emails in France:
–Opt-in, which authorizes the sending of prospecting emails under three conditions: firstly, the recipient must have consented to receive these emails, they must be able to unsubscribe if they wish, and the sending organization must clearly display its identity.
–Opt-out, a less restrictive rule, authorizes the sending of prospecting emails on condition that the recipient can easily unsubscribe at no cost.
In the business world, spam is email that does not respect the opt-out principle.
The fight against spam is also very active, and the Signal-Spam association (which brings together most of the French organizations involved in the fight against spam) has just opened its website to enable anyone to report spam in order to reduce the phenomenon. The site also includes anti-spam recommendations.
However, even if the action taken by this association is necessary to enforce the law, it’s still not enough to eradicate spam.
As for the figures, using our solution, over the first 4 months of 2007 we recorded an average of 84.4% spam on all emails received by our customers, and 0.8% viruses.
