Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing (CANSPAM) and anti-spam laws.

The average employee gets 13.3 messages per day and can spend as much as 10-30 minutes a day dealing with spam. The estimated cost to the company for each employee dealing with this spam on a daily basis is over $2000.00 annually. This decrease in productivity doesn’t even take into account having to deal with virus transmission and propagation and other security breaches caused by spam. The CANSPAM law was supposed to in theory slow down the onslaught of spam. In practice it has done very little to change the amount of spam you and I receive.

The Law, In Brief. CANSPAM does not make spam, the practice of sending unsolicited emails, illegal. It does have some specific requirements for commercial emails which are described in more detail below. The new law covers all email for which the primary purpose is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a product or service.

The law excludes emails related to transactional relationships such as billing statements, announcements of warranty information, follow-ups to customer requests, etc. The new federal law supercedes most state and local email laws, except those that cover fraud and deception. CANSPAM preempted laws in 35 states and, most significantly, wiped out provisions in many of those states allowing individual e-mail receipients to sue spammers directely. Under the new law, the Federal Trade Commission, other federal agencies, Internet Service Providers, and state attorney generals can sue on behalf of Internet users.

The New E-Marketing Requirements as per CAN-SPAM of 2003

The key rules you must follow to send legal email marketing messages are: Be truthful and clearly label advertisements using honest subject lines. Include your full address within every email message and reveal your true identity. Use a reply address that will be active for at least thirty days after sending your email Provide valid physical postal addresses. Get permission from Web site administrators and/or their members to harvest e-mail addresses from internet chat rooms, blogs, and other sources. The law specifically bans the practice of harvesting emails through an automated means. Allow recipients to opt-out and respect those requests within 10 days of receipt. A conspicuously displayed unsubscribe link must be included within every email. The from line should be from you or your business and not a sales pitch or marketing message. Related to sexually oriented email, a message within the subject line or at the top of the email must indicate the email's sexual nature. The new federal antispam legislation also has several provisions related to the sending of emails with false or misleading headers, deceptive subject lines.

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