In the US, the law governing the sending of commercial email is CAN SPAM. I’ve seen a number of questions about CAN SPAM recently. One came from twitter, where someone was asking if just having an email address meant permission to send to it. Clearly, just being able to dig up an email address doesn’t imply permission to send marketing or commercial email to it. I can promise you...
The question of putting unsub links on transactional messages came up on multiple lists recently. As with any question that has to do with email and controlling it, there were a lot of different opinions. A number of people believed that transactional mail should never, ever have an unsubscribe. Their argument was that transactional mail is too valuable to allow recipients to unsubscribe from it...
I’ve seen a lot of discussion and arguments over the CAN SPAM rule about whether or not an unsubscribe needs to be a One-Click unsubscribe. It’s gotten so common, I have a stock email I use as a template when wading into such discussions. It’s probably useful for a lot of other people, too, so I thought I’d share. The regs say: § 316.5 Prohibition on charging a fee or...
Yesterday the law firm Venable, LLP published a document discussing the recent California appellate court decision in Balsam v. Trancos. Their take is that commercial email that contains a generic from line and is sent from a proxied domain is a violation of the California Business and Professions Code § 17529.5(a)(2). The Trancos decision affects marketers using email to drive traffic to their...
Venkat analyzes the appeals court decision in Balsam v. Trancos, Inc.. In this case the appeals court decided that emails have to identify some actual person or entity they are sent by or from. Emails that do not identify the sender are in violation of the California anti-spam statute. Venkat talks about all the reasons he thinks this is a problematic ruling, and the CA courts and anti-spam...
Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools. Is their increased vigilance pissing you off? If so, your anger is misplaced. They are reacting quite sensibly to market conditions...
The Federal district court in New York awarded Yahoo $610 million dollars in a suit they filed in 2008.
I was recently taken to task for claiming that unsolicited bulk email was spam. Spam is illegal and Spammers are criminal. Let’s not mess about with words here. Calling someone a spammer is inflamitory [sic]. I’m not arguing that sending unsolicited bulk email is anything other than bad. And that a lot of senders have a negative reaction to being called spammers. I’ve even had hate...
I received this piece of unsolicited email today, to an address harvested off a website. How many CAN SPAM violations can you count? Return-Path: Received: by m.wordtothewise.com (Postfix, from userid 1003) id 166562E196; Wed, 5 Oct 2011 13:50:25 -0700 (PDT) Received: from [164.193.177.203] (86.sub-75-248-121.myvzw.com [75.248.121.86]) by m.wordtothewise.com (Postfix) with SMTP id 850862E185 for...
From Venkat at Eric Goldman’s blog we find the federal court has rejected an attempt to claim spam was “protected anonymous speech.”
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