The Australian Direct Marketing Association (ADMA) has been branded as "delusional" following its criticism of the National Office for the Information Economy's (NOIE) anti-spam report, which called for legislation banning junk e-mail.

Following the report, ADMA manager of legal and regulatory affairs, Jodie Sangster, defended unsolicited e-mail marketing material in the context of business-to-business marketing.

"I'm not defining it as spam," she told ZDNet Australia.

The association is alarmed at the potential effects the legislation may have on their members and are crying foul, downplaying the benefits of the proposed laws.

"We have content legislation, we have privacy legislation...the people sending this kind of material are already ignoring the current legislation and are unlikely to comply with a stricter policy," Sangster said.

Defending marketing material that doesn't breach content legislation by promoting pornography, fraudulent scams or other dubious offerings, she said e-mail marketing to businesses is perfectly acceptable, and the government should 'butt out'.

"With regard to the business-to-consumer market, there's been a push to move towards an opt-in approach and the direct marketing industry has made a move towards this approach...[but] business-to-business is a different ball game," she said.

"It's not for the government to censor what a business does and doesn't receive," she added.

According to Michael Ward, general manager for spam filtering company SpamTrap, ADMA has 'lost the plot'.

"I think that she's deluding herself if she thinks people are going to accept the unfettered access to inboxes that some marketing companies have," Ward said. "[It's] very different to...looking at advertising when I'm walking down the street, this is taking away productivity...it's a weapon of mass distraction".

The practice may be legal, but that's because nothing has been done yet, he added.

"It may be legal in the absence of legislation, but the minister has quite clearly foreshadowed legislation which will ban untargeted, indiscriminate bulk e-mail sent to recipients that have no previous business relationship [to the sender]," he said, referring to Senator Richard Alston, the minister of Communications, Information Technology and the Arts.

A potential explanation for the organisation's response is because of its members reactions, Ward said. "I would expect that ADMA is under siege from some of its members because it has lost this one."

Copyright © 2009 CBS Interactive, a CBS Company. All Rights Reserved.
ZDNET is a registered service mark of CBS Interactive. ZDNET Logo is a service mark of CBS Interactive.