Vietnam will start taking more control of unwanted emails and text messages that advertising service providers send to email and cellphone users by introducing a new government document it calls an “anti-spam decree.”

The introduction follows widespread complaints from email and cellphone subscribers that their inbox is frequently bombarded with messages they have not asked for.

Service providers are now allowed to send advertising material only after they have secured explicit consent from their recipients, according to Decree 77 released last week by the government.

An older version of the decree, issued in August 2008, permitted advertisers to do so without asking for prior approval from email or cellphone users.

Advertising emails or text messages must not be sent to recipients immediately when they have already lodged their rejections to the service providers, says the new degree which will enter into effect from next year, while the old ruling allowed senders 24 hours to stop such transmissions.

Advertisers or advertising service providers are required to acknowledge such rejections from email or cellphone users, the newly released degree notes.

The edict caps the number of emails or text messages at one, instead of five as per the 2008 regulations, each day and specifies that it can only be transmitted to receivers between 7:00 am and 10:00 pm.

It also stipulates that senders must submit a copy of the advertising material to the Ministry of Information and Communications once it has been sent to recipients.

Lawbreakers can be fined up to VND100 million (US$4,800) or even suspended forever, depending on their violations.

Applicable to Yahoo! Mail and Gmail?

This decree is also applicable to services provided by Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, Nguyen Van Hau, vice president of the Ho Chi Minh City Association of Jurists, said.

“Services by Yahoo! Mail and Gmail that employ the transmission of emails and text messages in Vietnam are also governed by this ‘anti-spam’ decree,” Hau asserted.

But an insider said Yahoo and Google have nothing to do with this as they are merely infrastructure operators.

“The decree is directed at individuals and organizations that supply advertising services, not the providers of infrastructure for them like Yahoo or Google,” Le Manh Hung, vice chairman of a local digital content business club, explained.

Yahoo and Google would not send junk mail to their account users, Hung elaborated, further explaining that it is advertisers who use Yahoo! Mail and Gmail accounts to spread this kind of material.

“Yahoo and Google are simply the intermediaries in this process.”