The Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) has announced measures to cut unwanted spam emails – but businesses are unlikely to see any benefit.



From 11th December 2003 it will be an offence, punishable by a £5000 fine, for companies in the UK to send unsolicited email or text messages to anyone unless the recipient has given approval or the recipient is a customer.



However there are two obvious shortcomings of this legislation. Firstly, the measures only cover personal email accounts leaving spammers able to continue targeting business email addresses. Secondly, if the spam originates from abroad, there is nothing to stop the unwanted messages from arriving into UK personal and business email accounts. Robert Moore of UK spam filtering company messagecleaner.co.uk says "an estimated 85% of UK spam is sent from abroad so there is little benefit to most people. It will be no panacea".



The DTI has already admitted that legislation will not stop unwanted emails clogging up networks and said that anti-spam filtering services and software will continue to play a vital role. Department figures estimate that spam accounted for half of global email traffic in August 2003.



"The fines are part of a wider international attempt to tackle spam," said Stephen Timms,

e-commerce minister.



In this regard, the government feels the legislation is useful in helping generate momentum to create global anti-spam legislation.



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