Japan may follow New Zealand in outlawing spam

October 20th, 2007

A panel of communications experts in Japan are studying possible future measures to outlaw commercial email sent without the recipient's prior consent.

If they took this step, they would join ranks with New Zealand which implemented such a law a few months ago. The U.S. has some laws on the books regarding email, but no national ones go as far as to make spam e-mail illegal.

Hold on one second. The word "implemented" suggests that a law has not only been placed on the books, but is also somehow being enforced. Early observations suggest this isn't quite the case. In fact, New Zealand's new spam law seems to be anything but successful.

Amongst many other obstacles, many countries get more spam from overseas than within their own borders. In this case, enforcement becomes near impossible. Even if a spammer in Brazil can clearly be shown to have violated British law, the prospects of getting an extradition on something as trivial as spam seems far-fetched.

Users of some email clients and servers can help combat this problem by configuring their programs to block messages originating from outside their country unless the sender is known to be legitimate. While Microsoft doesn't offer a spam filter for Outlook Express that supports this, their new Live Mail client in Windows Vista does.

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