No such facility as do-not-call register for email in Hong Kong or in any other part of the world

Last Saturday, while talking to the media appealing for the establishment of do-not-call register for person-to-person telemarketing calls, the Privacy Commissioner made a mistake that OFTA has already set up a do-not-call register for email. Here are the URLs below of local newspaper.


http://orientaldaily.on.cc/cnt/news/20101219/00176_015.html

http://news.mingpao.com/20101219/ggf1.htm

Actually, there is no such system as  do-not-call register for email in Hong Kong or in any other part of the world.  I can give three reasons below:

1. The majority (over 90 %) of spam emails are sent out by zombie computers, but not human email accounts. Will zombie computers look at the registry and do some screening before sending out ?


2. Even if spam emails are sent out by human email accounts, it is not possible to punish the senders as they are not in the same country as the recipients. Email has no national boundary.

3. Spammers can download the register and send more spam to those email addresses contained in the register. After all, these are live valid email accounts.


I hope that nobody will commit same mistake again in future.