No Unauthorized Email Collection

🇺🇸 United States

CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 & 18 U.S.C. § 1037

U.S. federal law treats the automated harvesting of e-mail addresses as an aggravated, criminally punishable practice:

• Address harvesting — obtaining e-mail addresses using an automated program from a website or online service whose policy is not to share its users' addresses — is prohibited.
• Dictionary attacks — generating recipient addresses by combining names, letters or numbers — are likewise prohibited.
• Under 18 U.S.C. § 1037, harvesting addresses from a website/service operated by another person without authorization, or randomly generating addresses by computer, is an aggravated violation that can support enhanced sentencing.

Penalties

Such conduct can trigger federal criminal prosecution under 18 U.S.C. § 1037 — fines and imprisonment of up to 5 years — and civil penalties enforced by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) on a per-email basis.

🇰🇷 Republic of Korea

Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection — Article 50-2 (Prohibition of Unauthorized Collection of Email Addresses)

• ① No one may collect e-mail addresses from an Internet website using a program or technical device that automatically gathers e-mail addresses, without the prior consent of the site's operator or administrator.
• ② No one may sell or distribute e-mail addresses collected in violation of paragraph ①.
• ③ No one may use e-mail addresses for transmitting information knowing that they were collected, sold or distributed in violation of paragraphs ① and ②.

Article 74 (Penalties)

A person who collects, sells, distributes, or uses e-mail addresses for transmitting information in violation of Article 50-2 is liable to imprisonment of up to 1 year or a fine of up to KRW 10 million.