Singapore anti-spam legislation is being discusses again (nice PR move Symantec!). I am 100% for any move to stop spam, but I couldn't help but notice a few oddities in the news report on the proposed bill.

1. "legislation only affects local servers" Does this mean a local company can host a server in a country without such laws and spam Singaporean without being held accountable? Why not have the legislation cover Singapore companies, not servers.
   
2. "All electronic spam has to be clearly labelled as advertisement" Does this apply to foreigners who spam Singaporeans too? Can't wait to see "legal" spam like [ Advertisement: My sad Nigerian story of wealth ] Then having an unsubscribe link at the end! =P
3. "Once a person unsubscribes, the spam sender has 10 days to remove him from the mailing list or face legal action" Hey, spam is legal for 10 days at a time! Maybe I can promote my blog through spam then completely destroy my spam database after 10 days.
   

What I'm interested in finding out is what kind of legal penalty will be imposed on spammers? I know of many Singapore direct marketeers who have no unsubscription mechanism! How much can we make from suing them?

On a more serious and technical note, I'm actually not as concern about the 80% international spam actually. For users of international email services like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, they have anti-spam engines that share trends throughout the network, so if the spam hits somewhere else first, the email system will know to put it into the spam folder when it reaches us.

Large MNCs who have invested in similar anti-spam technologies are also relatively safe, the rest of you... urm... I guess you can try to lobby your ISP for something world class.