Australia's first spam prosecution

It's good to see the first prosecution under the spam act, the big question now is to see what penalty Justice Nicholson imposes. The Spam Act allows the court to "The Court may order the person to pay to the Commonwealth such pecuniary penalty, in respect of each contravention, as the Court determines to be appropriate." So the fines could be anything from a dollar to the tens of millions.

Whether Wayne Mansfield has any money to pay these fines is another question. This case can't have been cheap to defend, and Wayne has lost in the courts before. Although with industries like unsolicited email and other Internet based scams it never ceases to surprise me how much money can be made.

To be fair to Mr Mansfield, he probably hasn't made billions. His spam seems to have only promoted his own businesses. He's certainly not accused of hijacking South Korean mail servers and pumping out billions of messages promoting dodgy investments and viagra. His mistake is that he just doesn't understand how much unsolicited email irritates people.

Interestingly, Wayne has his own blog where he shares some of his wisdom. Sadly, he doesn't give us his point of view on the proceedings. Although he does have some interesting links such as the one to Ivan Levinson's website.

This site has some terrific tips on writing advertising copy and emails, one of the first is "How to use e-mail to fire up sales (without getting flamed)". In it, Ivan describes what he finds to be spam at it's worst. It's a shame Wayne didn't read this article before he discovered unsolicited email.