Did you know it is legal to SPAM if you follow the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003?  We don’t recommend our clients attempt these methods themselves, but instead we suggest they outsource their spam to a third party who specializes in spam (of course there are better ways to reach your customers than spam, but that is a topic for another time).  Businesses must follow certain criteria, including:

Unsubscribe Compliance

• A visible and operable unsubscribe mechanism is present in all emails.
• Consumer opt-out requests are honored within 10 days.
• Opt-out lists also known as suppression lists are only used for compliance purposes.

Content Compliance

• Accurate from lines (including “friendly froms”)
• Relevant subject lines (relative to offer in body content and not deceptive)
• A legitimate physical address of the publisher and/or advertiser is present.
• A label is present if the content is adult.

Sending Behavior Compliance

• A message can not be sent through an open relay
• A message can not be sent to a harvested email address
• A message can not contain a false header

Note that falsifying header information is a serious violation of the CAN-SPAM Act and generally is an indicator of criminal or malicious intent which can bring the attention of other law enforcement agencies besides the FTC, including but not limited to the FBI, DOJ and US Postal Inspectors.

If you don’t follow these rules you may not go to jail for sending a few hundred emails, but you may get your company blacklisted by a spam blocking system like SORBS.  Once you get listed it takes time to get off the list.  The hard part is that you ARE in fact spamming so it is difficult to explain why you should be taken off one or more of the lists.  How do you get listed?  In most cases you have PISSED someone off by not providing a way to unsubscribe.  If you simply followed CAN-SPAM Act most of your problems would go away.

The only safe way to ‘SPAM’ is to outsource it to someone who specializes in helping businesses send out bulk emails that follow all of the CAN-SPAM Act rules like Constant Contact.  And no, your spam filter doesn’t allow YOU to spam…