Web business explained

We all hate spam and in 2003 Congress attempted to make email spam illegal with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 Wikipedia Article (actual text of the law here).

As with any legislation, the CAN-SPAM Act is a bit hard to read but fortunately there are a few simple guidelines that you can follow to keep yourself in compliance.

Unsubscribe Compliance:

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

I know that these instructions are still a bit technical so I’ll cover them one-by-one.

Visible opt-out mechanism means nothing more than an unsubscribe link, which is typically included at the end of the newsletter. If you are using a good newsletter service or program, this can be handled automatically. If you are sending mail through Outlook, Eudora, Mail or another email program on your computer then you will have to remove email addresses manually, which can be a real pain if you have many addresses at all.

You have ten days to remove the email. If you keep an opt-out list you cannot email people from it or share it with anybody else.

Content Compliance:

• Accurate from lines
• Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
• A label is present if the content is for adults.

You can’t put a fake addresses in your from line and your email subjects need to accurately describe the content of your newsletter. Since you aren’t trying to fool anybody, and you do want people to contact you, those would be foolish things to do anyway.

Most people don’t know that a legal email newsletter should have a physical address associated with it. It either needs to be included in the email or have a link to a web page that contains the address.

Adult content should be labled first thing on the page.

Sending Behavior Compliance:

• A message can not be sent through an open relay
• A message can not be sent to a harvested email address
• A message can not contain a false header

These are technical rules that most people don’t need to concern themselves with. They are intended to make it easier to prosecute spammers.

Why care?

It’s a legitimate question to ask. Unless we have good spam filtering on our email account we all get too much spam all the time. The ethical answer is the a legitimate business person shouldn’t stoop to the same level as criminals. And spammers are criminals. A couple of people who run spam factories have recently been prosecuted successfully.

The more practical answer is that one single complaint to an internet service provider (ISP) will get your newsletter blacklisted (not allowed to pass through the system). If you can show that you have followed the law, then you can in turn get your newsletter whitelisted (given a blanket okay). If you are actually out of compliance you may have to re-establish your list from scratch or lose that market altogether. Ouch. ISP’s have to blacklist your newsletter in you are out of compliance with CAN-SPAM. That’s also the law.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 29th, 2007 at 4:34 pm and is filed under Legal Considerations, Marketing Practices. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.