Over on the ET blog, Al posted about how CAN SPAM compliance is not sufficient for you to not be spamming.
It’s a bit different perspective, but very complimentary to my post yesterday about what is and is not spam. He and I have both heard from ISP people about how many requests for whitelisting or unblocking are prefaced with, “We comply with CAN SPAM” and how meaningless that statement really is. Al has a longer discussion of why.
A few days ago I was reading the attempt by e360 and Dave Linhardt to force Comcast to accept his mail and to stop people posting in the newsgroup news.admin.net-abuse.email from claiming he is a spammer. The bit that pops out at me in this complaint of his, is the fact that he believes that by complying with the minimal standards of the CAN-SPAM act, he is not spamming.
The problem with this claim is that CAN SPAM lists the minimal standards an email must meet in order to avoid prosecution. CAN SPAM does not define what is spam, it only defines the things senders must do in order to not be violating the act. There is no legal definition of spam or of what is not spam.
To add to the confusion there are a number of confusing and contradictory definitions of spam. Definitions people have used over the years include:
One of the challenges of my job is to separate my personal feelings and experiences related to email marketing and spam from my advice to clients. I am here to make your delivery better, not to make everyone use email marketing the way that makes me the most comfortable.
That being said, I get a lot of spam across my various email addresses. If I have an extra few minutes I’ll sometimes send complaints, but more and more it is too hard, too complicated and / or the ISPs do not care anyway. In the last 2 weeks I’ve had 3 experiences with unexpected / unwanted email (aka: spam) where I did take action.
Before I can talk about permission and how a mailer can collect permission from a recipient to send them email I really need to define what I mean by permission as there are multiple definitions used by various players in the market. Permission marketing was a term coined by Seth Godin in his book entitled Permission Marketing.
The underlying concept beneath permission marketing is that all marketing should be “anticipated, personal and relevant.” Others have defined permission marketing as consumers volunteering or requesting to be marketed to.
When I talk about permission in the email marketing context I mean that the recipient understood *at the time they provided the sender with an email address* that they would receive email from that sender as a result.
Let’s look at some of the relevant parts of that definition.