Recently, the Federal trade commission has issued some new rulings to help clarify CANSPAM, the law which regulates spam emailing.

To review, this law was developed to create a permission based email system. Basically, you can only send out commercial email to those that ask for it.

First, there is a difference between transactional and permission base email. If I make a purchase from a web site, the company may send out a receipt email to me for that purchase or transaction with the site. Or it could be that I requested some information from that site and they are emailing me that information. Transactional emails are one time deals. Permission based emails for commercial purpose may be newsletters, special offers, or updates about a company. The company must overtly ask for your permission to send you emails.

How that company gets you to agree to allow them to send you and email varies. The most secure way is with the double opt-in. This is where a customer signs up for your emails, but then is sent an email confirming they did so and must either reply or click a link to confirm again they wish to receive a company’s email. Other ways are to get the customer’s verbal permission, or a single opt-in method.

Second, when sending out email for commercial purposes, there must always be a way listed to opt out. This can be a link or directions to send a removal request to the email master for that company. In addition, there must be a physical address listed, in case the customer wishes to mail in a request to be removed from the list.

Recently, I requested information from a software company and received the information by email. At the bottom of the email was this line:

“PS: You have been added to our monthly newsletter list, once you have received the first newsletter, you may unsubscribe at any time.”

This is a very clever way to add some one to your list. In our promotion on how to make a tat last forever, the artist will take a picture of the tat and email the picture to the customer (transactional). The line above lets the customer know that they will be receiving news letters and can opt out at any time. This is an implied permission based email gathering technique. If the customer does not opt out of your email list, by implication of that lack of action, they have given you permission to send them commercial emails.