Spam Compliance Steps

When reviewing your business practices and the content of your commercial messages to ensure you comply with the Spam Act, you should consider the following three steps:

Step 1 – Consent

Your commercial messages should only be sent when you have consent. This may be express consent from the person you with to contact – a direct indication that it is okay to send the message, or messages of that nature. It is also possible to infer consent based on a business or other relationship with the person and their conduct.

Step 2 – Identify

Your commercial messages should always contain clear and accurate identification of who is responsible for sending the message and how they can be contacted.

It is important for people to know who is contacting them and how they can get in touch in return. This will generally be the organisation that authorises the sending of the message, rather than the name of the person who actually hits the ‘send’ button.

Step 3 – Unsubscribe

Your commercial messages should contain an unsubscribe facility, allowing people to indicate that such messages should not be sent to them in future. All commercial electronic messages must contain a functional unsubscribe facility, allowing people to opt-out from receiving future messages. Such a request must be honoured.

The Spam Act specifies that the person’s consent has been withdrawn within five working days from the date that unsubscribe request was sent (in the case of electronic unsubscribe messages) or delivered (in the case of unsubscribe messages sent by post or other means).