Are Your Bulk Emails CANSPAM Compliant?

What is CANSPAM and why does it matter?

As email started to become more commonly used by people who were online it was quickly discovered that if you could send 40 million emails out to random email addresses that some people would buy something.

That was good news for the people sending email and good news for the small percentage that bought something but it was TERRIBLE news for the other 39,998,247 email recipients.

And this happened daily.

That means that you and I spend time each day deleting emails that have no relevance to you and I whatsoever.

The CANSPAM act was crafted to stem the tide of emails hitting our inbox. At the same time software companies and ISP’s were writing spam filtering software to limit spam, the legislators were hard at work.

The US Congress passed the CANSPAM Act into law in 2003 and it took effect on January 1, 2004. Spam is still an ongoing problem but I should point out that the US Government is one of the first in the world to enact legislation to allow for prosecution of professional spammers.

Here are the basic components you need to ensure your emails remain compliant.

1.  Truth in Advertising.  You must not create false or misleading subject lines, header files, or  FROM information.  Simply put, if you tell the truth you’ll be ok.

2.  Physical Address.  You must put your physical address in the email.

3.  Ability to Unsubcribe.  You must display a clear method for someone to stop receiving an email.

4.  Unsubscribe Requests.  You must honor requests to be removed from your list.

There are more specific details of the law and you can read the actual text here.
Mitch’s Notes.

The CANSPAM Act does allow for the sending of bulk email should you have a ‘prior business relationship’ with someone however these days anytime someone receives an email they don’t want or don’t remember asking for they may well label it spam.
It’s therefore my recommendation and our practice that we require all of our email recipients to be of the double opt-in variety.  That means a reader fills in the form, we send a confirmation email which asks the reader to click on a link to verify they are a) a real person and b) asking to receive email.  If they do not do this, we do not send an email.

This practice ensures less time spent on removing your IP address from blacklists and you get a higher level of deliverability.

One thing is for sure.  It pays to follow best practices in addition to keep your email program legal.