The Ordinance would regulate all messages advertising or promoting goods or services that could be sent by electronic means, such as pre-recorded voice messages, faxes, e-mails, and messages through short messaging services (SMS) or multimedia messaging services (MMS).

The Hong Kong Government will implement the Unsolicited Electronic Messages Ordinance (UEMO) in two phases to regulate the sending of commercial electronic messages.

The first phase of the Ordinance, which has come into effect on June 1 2007, covers the use of unscrupulous techniques to reach out to more recipients, such as the supply of list of electronic addresses harvested from Internet webpages, or the actual use of address harvesting software to capture e-mail addresses for sending commercial electronic messages without the consent of recipients, as well as other techniques such as "dictionary attacks" or "brute force attacks" commonly used by spammers.

The second phase of the Ordinance, which will come into effect by the end of 2007, will establish the rules for sending commercial electronic messages.

For more details, please visit the following Hong Kong Government webpage:
http://www.antispam.gov.hk/english/main.htm

If you have any enquiries about the Ordinance, please submit to ITSC Electronic HelpDesk.