Ten Business Days Doesn’t Help
10 May 2013
I unsubscribed from a mailing list recently. When I did, I was confronted with the following message: We’re sorry to see you go. You should be aware that it could take up to ten business days to completely remove your address from our lists. That’s a pretty standard disclaimer that complies with the time limits…
Canada’s anti-spam law: Does it apply to me?
30 March 2011
Lots of time and space has been dedicated to an examination of Canada’s new anti-spam law. And we have been watching it too. For a general overview of the law, I would suggest reading Al Iverson’s ExactTarget blog post about it. Today, though, let us consider a burning question in the eyes of marketers: “Does…
When is a press release an advertisement?
3 March 2010
One of the first things I learned when I became a legal assistant is that there are rarely any pat answers. A blanket assertion is almost always wrong. (Did you see the attorney-like weasel wording there?) There has been an interesting discussion on Twitter today regarding a February Techcrunch post (and wow is a half…
When is transactional mail not transactional anymore?
2 December 2009
An interesting question came across my desk this morning. Here’s the request from someone we’ll call “Joe”: I need some help understanding CAN-SPAM requirements. I represent a membership organization. From time to time, we send marketing message to our members and, of course, some of the unsubscribe from those messages. Now we are getting to…
Use Private Domain Registration and Go to Jail?
4 November 2009
The 9th Circuit opinion in USA v. Kilbride has been released. This is primarily an obscenity case against the defendants for sending pornographic spam email. But, it also includes a challenge to 18 U.S.C. § 1037 on vagueness grounds. 18 U.S.C. § 1037 is the part of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 that deals with…
Confirm to unsubscribe?
21 July 2009
A question comes in this morning: Requiring the confirmation of an email address in an unsubscription is not CAN-SPAM compliant, right? While I’m not a lawyer, to my understanding that is absolutely correct. The current implementing rules for CAN-SPAM state: Neither a sender nor any person acting on behalf of a sender may require that…
A CAN-SPAM Checklist
1 June 2009
Today we’re going to create a checklist of things required for CAN-SPAM compliance. So, you want to make sure that you actually comply with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 and not just say that you do. This post isn’t for you. You might learn something here and if you do, that’s great. But, instead, this…
Prior Business Relationships are irrelevant
7 October 2008
When people don’t want to get permission to send mail, they usually don’t want to do other things as well. For instance, they don’t want to offer a way to unsubscribe. They want to make it easy to start and hard to stop. Unfortunately, CAN-SPAM decrees it should be easy to stop mail. And so…
Sending email to wireless domains?
25 September 2008
One question that I get asked a lot has to do with sending email to wireless domains. So, I’ll lay out the answer here for all the world to see: No unsolicited messages may be sent to a recipient on a mobile domain for any reason, period. Here’s the general rule from the FCC’s Order…