Spam-blocking law proposed in Japan

by Kuriko Miyake

November 9, 2001 —

A proposed law would for the first time ban unsolicited commercial e-mail in Japan. The country's largest opposition party, the Democratic Party of Japan, will bring a bill forbidding the practice of spamming to the parliament, or Diet, which is currently in session, the party said Thursday.

The bill consists of three parts:

-- Senders are obliged to state "this is an advertisement" when sending nonrequested e-mail.

-- Senders are never allowed to send e-mail to recipients who have informed senders by phone or e-mail that they refuse e-mail from them.

-- Telecommunication carriers can refuse e-mail from spammers when it might cause system problems.

In the bill, spam is defined as mail that is sent for vendors' advertising purposes without recipients' consent or request. E-mail senders are obligated to disclose their name, address and e-mail address and to inform recipients that they have the right to refuse such mail.

In Japan, spam has become a social problem since NTT DoCoMo Inc.'s wireless Internet I-mode users started receiving large amounts of unwanted junk e-mail sent randomly by vendors this year.

The company earlier this week announced measures to block spam before it reaches recipients by detecting e-mail that is sent to unidentified e-mail addresses and returning it to senders with an error message from the NTT DoCoMo server.

"Out of 9.5 million e-mail messages coming to our server, 8 million are randomly sent to unidentified e-mail addresses" and can be regarded as spam, said NTT DoCoMo President and Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Keiji Tachikawa, who also urged the government to regulate spammers, at a Tokyo conference.

The Democratic Party of Japan can be contacted at http://dpj.or.jp/. NTT DoCoMo, in Tokyo, can be contacted at +81-3-5156-1111 or at http://www.nttdocomo.co.jp/.

IDG News Service