In December 2010, Canadian federal government passed a set of new laws governing the sending of
commercial email over Canadian computer networks. These laws took full effect on July 1st, 2014.
In summary, CASL (Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation) requires the sender of a commercial electronic
email obtain permission BEFORE they are allowed to send to the email recipient. In addition, the law
mandates commercial emails contains truthful header and non-misleading header information, proper
identification of the sending party and time limit. According to the Canadian government, any email
sent to/from a Canadian computer, mailbox or network falls under jurisdiction of CASL. Millions of
small business owners, including charities and even volunteers with organized sports will now have to
worry about running afoul of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission.
What are your thoughts on the anti-spam laws? How do they protect consumers and affect
businesses? Do you believe anti-spam laws are a good/bad idea…and are they working or not working?
I believe there are a few perspectives to consider when investigating this issue. First is from a receiving
end or a personal level. Which I think this is a great advancement because there are no endless amounts
of mail that we consider junk taking up our space especially, when there is no interest in the product or
service information being sent. The second, is from a company/ marketing perspective which poses as a
huge disadvantage. Business use such threads of communication to obviously promote their ventures
however, it’s the small business that punish most. Seeing that emailing is free and easy to get
information out, makes it tough on small business that can not afford a giant marketing team for many
its their main form of marketing.
This legislation protects consumers in various ways the first being the consent one must give in
order to receive emails which also stops people from being abused and bombarded with emails from
hackers and business. Like I have already mentioned earlier it negatively affects businesses but it
defiantly deteriorates the online business sector more significantly. Since online stores don’t have a
physical place to be recognised it relies on emails and online ads for most of their marketing. I believe it
is a good idea because it benefits everyone including business owners in their personal life. The only
drawback is that marketing individuals are going to need to work much harder to earn the same amount
of money. I believe this process is working because I can easily compare an email account I had quite a