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The FTC Hands Down New CAN-SPAM Rules

I follow a lot of blogs, including one by Silverpop CEO Bill Nussey. Silverpop is a email marketing company the provides users with wizard driven email marketing campaigns – and a lot of reporting features. IN a recent posting Nussey talks about new rules which may affect you if you do any kind of list based email. This is a direct partial copy of that item, and a link to the blog is found in my blogroll.  Enjoy.

In case you haven’t heard yet, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission last week enacted new rules intended to clarify the original provisions of the 2003 CAN-SPAM Act. The supplementary ruling, which goes into effect June 26, may have important ramifications for your email marketing program. I encourage you to seek the advice of your legal counsel about how these new rules may affect your programs. In the meantime, here’s a summary of the key provisions for discussion purposes:

Mandated Simplification of Opt-out Processes
The new rules clarify the opt-out required under CAN-SPAM. You’ll want to examine your opt-out process to determine if it is in compliance with this new rule, which states:

The opt-out may not be conditioned on the payment of any fee.
The recipient must not be required to provide anything more than email address and associated opt-out preferences for that email address (i.e., no password, account number, name, etc. can be required).
The opt-out mechanism must rely on either a reply email or a visit to a single Internet Web page and nothing more (i.e., multiple Web page opt-out processes are no longer allowed).
P.O. Box Usage Confirmed
Businesses may publish a sender’s P.O. box or private mailbox in a commercial email message to comply with the valid physical postal address requirement.

Designated Sender Rule Established
This new rule provides a framework whereby multiple advertisers that appear in the same commercial email message, each of which normally would satisfy the Act’s definition of “sender,” may designate a single sender among them as the sole sender of the message. If you routinely engage in list rentals or joint promotions, you will want to examine this provision closely.

Rules Regarding Incented Forwarding
The new rules confirm that if a company offers something of value (e.g., sweepstakes entry or discount) to incent a user to forward a commercial message to a friend, the company providing the incentive is held responsible for complying with CAN-SPAM as a Sender of the resulting message.

The FTC was widely expected to collapse the amount of time senders have to comply with an opt-out from 10 business days to three business days, but no change was issued. The 10 business day opt-out rule remains in effect.

The Email Sender & Provider Coalition has issued a summary of the new rules, which you can check out here. Or, you can access the full FTC text by clicking here.