This morning Industry Canada published its final regulations regarding the implementation of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law. Email related provisions of the law will take effect June 1, 2014.

What does this mean? It means that anyone sending mail from Canada or anyone sending mail that is accessed in Canada is required to have explicit opt-in consent for sending that mail, with a few exceptions. These exceptions include commercial electronic messages that are:

• sent within an organization;
• sent between organizations that already have a relationship, where the message concerns the activities of the organization to which the message is sent;
• sent on platforms where the required identification and unsubscribe information is conspicuously published and readily available to the recipient on the user interface, where duplication in each message would be needlessly repetitious;
• sent and received within limited access secure and confidential accounts to which only the provider of the account can send messages, such as banking websites;
• solicited or sent in response to complaints, inquiries, and requests;
• sent due to a legal or juridical obligation or to enforce a right, legal or juridical obligation, court order, judgment or tariff; to provide notice of an existing or pending right, legal or juridical obligation, court order, judgment or tariff; or to enforce a right arising under a law of Canada, of a province or municipality of Canada, or of a foreign state.
• sent by or on behalf of registered charities for fundraising purposes; or
• sent by or on behalf of a political party or organization, or a person who is a candidate—as defined in an Act of Parliament or the legislature of a province—for publicly elected office and the message has as its primary purpose soliciting a contribution as defined in subsection 2(1) of the Canada Elections Act.

Other folks (most of whom live east of me, so got their notices up earlier this morning) have blogged about this as well. CAUCE has a roundup of relevant blog posts.