Direct marketers give Spam Summit their blessing

The Direct Marketing Association has given its support to the UK government's first Spam Summit, claiming legitimate email marketers welcome the attempt to clean up and moderate their industry.

The DMA will be as aware as anybody that the industry has become over-run with cowboy operations that have created the spam problem we see today.

Unscrupulous marketers are clogging up our inboxes with unsolicited emails, offering everything from miracle weight loss pills and generic Viagra to loans, credit cards and pornography. Such a practice lowers the response rate for more legitimate forms of email marketing and the DMA supports any move which will reverse this trend.

Nick McConnell, UK general manager of Digital Impact and chairman of the Direct Marketing Association's Email Marketing Council, said: "The growth in spam volume is as much of an issue for genuine email marketers as it is for the consumers whose inboxes it clogs up, and threatens the entire future of the industry itself.

"Combating spam is a multi-faceted approach involving legislation, ISPs and spam software, and at the DMA's Email Marketing Council we are well aware of the need for marketers to fulfil our part of that approach."

Companies such as Digital Impact, who manage email campaigns for major corporates are by and large keen to comply with tightening legislation, realising they need to be on the side of the policy makers and software providers if their message is going to continue to get through increasingly stringent filters.

Enrique Salem, CEO of anti-spam vendor Brightmail, which sponsored the Spam Summit, said: "The legitimate marketing firms, such as Digital Impact, are going to have to make themselves known to us and tell us what they are doing because technology is going to have to be able to identify them and distinguish legitimate marketing from spam."