Being Compliant with Anti-Spam Legislations
SPAM is a chronic problem world-wide and quite often that means us, as email marketing service providers, have a pretty tough job policing and ensuring all emails that go out of our system are compliant with relevant Spam laws.
In this article we’ll attempt to explain the issue of SPAM, what it means, what are the laws, what’s at stake and how to make sure you are compliant with all relevant international guidelines and policies.
The Issue of SPAM in simple Engligh
Spam is an issue about consent, not content. Whether the Unsolicited Bulk Email (“UBE”) message is an advert, a scam, porn, a begging letter or an offer of a free lunch, the content is irrelevant – if the message was sent unsolicited and in bulk then the message is spam.
Spam is not a sub-set of UBE, it is not “UBE that is also a scam or that doesn’t contain an unsubscribe link”. All email sent unsolicited and in bulk is Spam.
This distinction is important because legislators spend inordinate amounts of time attempting to regulate the content of spam messages, and in doing so come up against free speech issues, without realizing that the spam issue is solely about the delivery method.
Definition of SPAM
The word “Spam” as applied to Email means “Unsolicited Bulk Email”.
Unsolicited means that the Recipient has not granted verifiable permission for the message to be sent. Bulk means that the message is sent as part of a larger collection of messages, all having substantively identical content.
A message is Spam only if it is both Unsolicited and Bulk.
- Unsolicited Email is normal email
(examples: first contact enquiries, job enquiries, sales enquiries) - Bulk Email is normal email
(examples: subscriber newsletters, customer communications, discussion lists)
International Regulations around sending email communication
The United States Can-SPAM Act
New Zealand Unsolicited Electronic Messages Act
Australian Anti-SPAM Act (2003)
Anti-Spam and Privacy Laws for the European Union
Maxmail introduces new policy to fight SPAM and eradicate Spammers from its global network
Fighting SPAM comes as part of the territory of being a market leader in email marketing. Since there’s no way we can “predict” who will SPAM, all we can do is make sure we have tough enough policies in place to deter SPAMMERS and make sure our system is not used for sending unsolicited emails.
Hence, as of July 1, 2010, Maxmail has introduced new policies that imposes hefty fines and penalties with potential for litigation if it is proven that a particular Maxmail user has breached our Anti-Spam policies and our Terms of Use Agreement.
Read the Maxmail Terms of Use Agreement here.
The bottom line is this
- DO NOT send emails where you are not sure whether or not you have the “express permission” from your subscribers
- In all your campaigns make sure you have an unsubscribe link
- Mention your full company name, contact details and a phone number
- Specify where, when and how you got the email address of your subscribers – remind them of when they opted in
- Collect evidence that your subscribers indeed opted in – Capture the IP address from which they opted in (if using web forms), the date, website URL etc.
- If in doubt – do the right thing – ask for their permission before sending them the email.
Email Spam Vs Junk Mail in the Mailbox – Whats the Diff?
Sending postal mail costs money to the sender, both to print and to deliver, so there is a monetary threshold that keeps every company in the country from sending lots of it. That threshold ensures that, while you may receive what you think is an irritating amount of junk, your postal mailbox is not completely flooded with it.
Email, on the other hand, costs nothing to the sender therefore there is no monetary barrier or incremental cost to deter how much email spam can be sent. With this in mind, here’s the problem:
There are over 30,000,000 businesses in North America alone. If sending postal junk mail cost nothing to print or to deliver and therefore each North American business could freely send you one item of postal junk mail per month, you personally would receive 1,000,000 items of postal junk mail each day. Obviously your post mailbox would not cope even with a tiny fraction of that. Luckily, print and postal delivery costs prevent that ever occurring. But not so with junk email.
Very simply, spam does not scale. There is no way for a recipient to say “I will accept only 10 items of spam per day and no more” since there is no mechanism to force millions of junk senders to stop sending after the recipient’s daily quota has been reached. Nor is there any mechanism to force spam senders to not send more than one spam per month to each recipient. Nor is there any mechanism to limit who can send spam to your email address. The Internet is international — can only North American businesses send you spam? How about South American businesses? And European businesses? What about businesses in Asia or Africa, are they not allowed to send spam to you as well?.
If you agree to accept spam as an advertising medium, then you automatically agree that every business in the world can send spam to your email addresses. As you have no way to limit who can send you spam, you are therefore agreeing to receive bulk email advertisements from a potential 200,000,000 businesses worldwide. Assuming each only sends you one spam per month you would receive 6,600,000 spams per day… meaning 4,500 spams per minute, or 150 spams per second, into your email mailbox. Many businesses would like to send you much more than one advert per month, possibly more than one per day! So how do you solve this problem?
The obvious solution is to limit who can send bulk email advertisements to you, so that you only receive the bulk email you actually want to receive.
Instead of agreeing to receive millions of unsolicited bulk emails from millions of senders, the solution is to instead opt to receive only bulk emails from specific lists you decide and consent to subscribe to. That, is what Spamhaus advocates and works to lobby world governments to legislate.