Another CASL fine

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Porter Airlines had agreed to pay a fine of $150,000 for violations of the Canadian Anti-Spam Law (CASL).
After investigating the airline, CRTC found multiple violations of the statute. These violations include no unsubscribe link or the unsubscribe link was not prominent enough.
Some of the messages at issue failed to have proper identification. Finally, Porter Airlines couldn’t prove consent for at least some subset of the subscribers.
This is another in a series of enforcement actions where CRTC fined companies for violations of CASL. But none of those enforcement actions really seem overly punitive. There were multiple people publicly concerned about CRTC aggressively fining companies and even driving them out of business. These concerns now appear to be unfounded. Certainly, CRTC is enforcing the law but in a way to help companies come into compliance with it.
Another major concern some individuals had was the private right of action under CASL. I recently attended a conference where one of the talks was related to CASL and enforcement. What was said there is that there are some constraints on bringing a case. For instance cases can’t be brought in lower courts, they have to be brought in the provincial (I think) courts. This puts an additional burden on plaintiffs. Reading between the lines, my impression was this was intended by the regulatory agency and lawmakers to stop nuisance type suits, but allow for real action when needed.
Finally, I have yet to hear about any enforcement action that resulted in fines for corporate officers rather than the corporation as an entity.
All in all, the chicken littles claiming that this law was going to drive email marketers out of business seem to have been wrong. In fact, when I asked a question during the session “have you heard of any companies stopping marketing in Canada due to CASL” the first response was a scoff. This was not the purpose or intent of the law, and it doesn’t appear to be enforced that way.

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The DMA: Email marketing or spam?

A few weeks ago, I signed up for a webinar from the DMA. As is my normal process I used a tagged address. I don’t remember any notification that I would be signing up for mail, and I generally do look for those kinds of things. I also know a lot of webinars are used to drive sales processes and I prefer not to waste sales time if I’m not actually looking to purchase.
In recent weeks I have gotten an ongoing stream of marketing messages from the DMA. I’ve tried to opt-out, but the DMA don’t actually want me to opt-out. Each marketing message is a different type of message from a different list. Each list must be opted out of individually.
First it was Conferences, then it was Education, then it was Awards, then Events. I’m trying to figure out what’s next and how many more times the DMA is going to get to spam me before I just turn that address into a spam trap.
And before you tell me that I can’t make an address a spam trap, think about that a little bit. I never opted this mail in to receive anything but the webinar confirmation. I’ve dutifully opted out each and every time the DMA has mailed me. I’ve even tried to opt-out of all mail. Unfortunately, the DMA has placed the “opt-out of all mail” behind a registration wall, one I cannot get to as I do not have (or want) a DMA account.
DMASignOn
The DMA is sending me mail I did not request and do not want. They have made it impossible for me to determine how much mail I will get. They have made it difficult for me to opt-out of all their mail.
This is an example of bad email marketing. I’m sure that the DMA will tell me this is all permission based email. I disagree. This is an example of the DMA taking permission. This is not an example of a sender asking for permission. I didn’t give permission to be added to all these DMA lists, and I have no way to actually revoke the permission that they took from me.
I signed up for a second webinar with this email address, one related to CASL. The irony is that the DMA’s behavior here is a violation of a number of points of CASL. First, there was no clear opt-in notice on the website. Second, CASL requires parity between opt-in and opt-out. If I opt-in once then I should be able to opt-out once. CASL puts an end to this opt-in once, opt-out dozens of times process.
I wish I could say I was disappointed in the DMA. But I’m barely surprised. Their track record is poor and they have typically fallen on the side of “I have consent until you force me to acknowledge that I don’t.” In this case, the DMA is demonstrating that quite clearly. They will keep spamming and spamming and spamming. I have no doubt were I to actually register an account, they would continue to spam me with “account notifications” that I was unable to opt-out of because they are transactional, membership messages.

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Recipients need to be able to unsubscribe

The The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Plentyoffish Media paid a $48,000 fine for CASL violations. According to the  CRTC news release, Plentyoffish Media was failing to allow consumers to unsubscribe from mail in compliance with CASL.
CASL requires that any commercial electronic email message contain an easy and free unsubscribe mechanism. Plentyoffish sent mail to its members without an unsubscribe mechanism. According to their webpage (HT: Sanket) there were some messages that users were unable to opt-out of without closing their account.

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July 2014: The month in email

We continue to be busy with really interesting client work. Look for some new posts and white papers to come out of this research over the next few months, but for now blogging has been a bit light while we’re working hard. In parallel with our busy times, we have also been pondering the ways in which the email world illustrates the classic bon mot  “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”, and we’ve been revisiting some posts from a few years ago to examine this.
We started July with a nod to a good subscription experience just as CASL, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation went into effect on Canada Day. While companies have another 17 months to put these provisions into practice, it’s a good reminder that periodic re-engagement with customers can be very effective in helping you maintain high-quality subscriber lists. We talked a bit more about CASL here and what protections the law intends.
In stark contrast, we posted about an organization that is doing a less-than-stellar job making sure they’re only sending wanted email. The Direct Marketing Association is a terrific resource and member organization for marketers across industries and channels, but their email marketing practices don’t always live up to their mission of “Advancing and Protecting Responsible Data-Driven Marketing”, and we explored some ways in which they might improve this.
Those of you who have been reading this blog for any time at all know that we tend to talk about wanted mail and unwanted mail rather than the more general category of spam. Marketers tend to think their mail can’t possibly be spam if it’s not offering Viagra or phishing for credit card information, but that’s not really the point — if a customer doesn’t want to read your email about new mountain bikes, even if they bought a mountain bike from you three years ago, that’s unwanted email. Here’s a post we revisited about why customers might not want your mail, and a new post about engagement.
One risk of sending unwanted email, of course, is that customers complain, and that will affect your delivery going forward. We revisited a post about feedback loops, and also talked a bit about addressing delivery problems as they come up rather than waiting for them to resolve on their own (mostly, they won’t!)
I also proposed a bit of a thought experiment around monetizing the complaint stream, and followed up with a second post. There are some good points in the comments of those posts, but mostly I think it’s an interesting solution to addressing risk and abuse at ESPs.
Finally, Steve wrote a short post about our new mail servers and how quickly spammers descended as we set those up. It’s a constant battle!

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