Canadians Welcome Belated Anti-Spam Legislation

Ottawa, Canada (AHN) - Canadians welcomed Parliament's Anti-Spam Act. Canada was the only western nation without anti-spam measures.

Patterned after Australia's anti-spam law, the ASA requires identification of email senders, accurate header information, prohibits misleading subject lines and makes it necessary to provide contact details of the sender.

For commercial email senders, they must offer a way for receivers to stop similar messages in the future.

The bill contains fines of $500,000 for first-time offenders to penalties up to $2.5 million for repeat violators. However, analysts were pessimistic it could ever become a law because it is a private member's bill instead of a government-back measure.

Since 2005 Canada's National Task Force on Spam has recommended the passage of an anti-spam measure.

Meanwhile, New York is several steps ahead of Canada after Los Angeles District Judge Audrey Collins slapped a $230 million penalty on known Spam King Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. The two were ordered to pay social website MySpace for damages, with the fine considered the largest anti-spam decision.

The spam duo created MySpace accounts and stole the passwords of existing account holders from which they emailed 730,000 messages directing readers to money-making websites that sells various items.