CAN-SPAM Act
The CAN-SPAM Act is a federal law enacted is 2003 that sets the rules for commercial email in order to protect recipients from spam / unsolicited commercial email (UCE). MyNewsletterBuilder (MNB) fully complies with all CAN-SPAM laws.
The CAN-SPAM Act covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business (B2B) email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law. Any violation of the CAN-SPAM Act can result in steep fines.
Here’s a summary of CAN-SPAM’s main requirements:
- Don’t use fake or deceptive header information. Your “To,” “From,” “Reply-To,” and routing information – including the originating domain name and email address – must be accurate and identify the person or business who sent the message.
- Don’t use misleading subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
- Identify the message as an advertisement. The law provides a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your email is an advertisement.
- Tell recipients you’re location or place of business. Your message must include your proper postal address. This can be your current street address, a PO Box registered with a U.S. Postal Service Office, or private mailbox registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
- Inform recipients how to opt-out of receiving future email from you.. Your message must include clear and conspicuous instructions of how the recipient can opt-out of getting email from you in the future. Give a return email address or clickable link to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt-out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
- Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
- Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.
MyNewsletterBuilder provides all the necessary tools for handling opt-in and opt-out requests.