also put out any email marketing fires.
www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.
FIGURE 2-3: The CAN-SPAM Act Compliance Guide for Business web page.
Conducting your business online
If you’re a glutton for punishment and make your way through all the clauses and subclauses of the CAN-SPAM Act, you may end up thinking that there's no way you can end up doing any business online. The good news is that the FTC has anticipated your doubt and preemptively answers a lot of frequently asked questions — you know, FAQs. We’ve summarized those questions and answers for you in the following list:
The three information types: The CAN-SPAM Act applies depending on the primary purpose of the email message. The FTC has three different types of information:Commercial content, which advertises or promotes a commercial product, commercial service, or website that’s operated for a commercial product or serviceTransactional or relationship content, which is content about a transaction you’ve already agreed to with the other party, as well as updates sent to a customer about an ongoing transactionOther content, which doesn’t fit into one of the other two categoriesIf you’re guessing that your email falls into the commercial category, then pass Go and collect your 200 dollars — the email is governed by the CAN-SPAM Act.
Combo guidelines: What happens if your email contains both commercial content and one or both of the other two types of content? The primary purpose of the message decides: If the email Subject line and/or body of the message would cause the recipient to conclude that the message is of a commercial nature, the message falls under the CAN-SPAM Act.
Who’s responsible?: If your message is sent by more than one company, such as one designed to announce a partnership between you and other companies to sell products, you can have one of the other companies send the message for CAN-SPAM compliance.The From line in the message must be from an account with that other company and must comply with all other CAN-SPAM requirements. If they don’t, all the companies listed in the message will be held liable, so be sure that the other company knows CAN-SPAM backward and forward.
Forward properly: Speaking of forwarding, if you want to have a message with a link to invite readers to forward your email to a friend, the sender may be required to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.Has the person or company selling the product or service offered to pay the forwarder in some way, such as with a cash payment or in exchange for a benefit such as driving traffic to the forwarder’s website? Then the seller is the person or company responsible for following CAN-SPAM guidelines.
If you want to view the FAQs in their entirety to gather more information and see examples, head on over to the FTC: www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business.
Looking at specific industry regulations
If your industry has any specific email-sending regulations, contact the industry groups you’re affiliated with to find out whether they have any guidelines. Hopefully, they post any information on their website, but if not, a quick email or phone call may identify issues you need to be aware of.
In addition to checking online communication rules in your industry, you should look at organizations dedicated to fighting villains such as malware, spam, and viruses and to creating better online communication. The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is one such organization, but because that’s a mouthful, the group also goes by the abbreviation M3AAWG, which is only slightly easier to remember, let alone say. Fortunately, after you type www.m3aawg.org (see Figure 2-4) into the address bar, you can bookmark the page and forget the URL.
You know that the M3AAWG is a serious effort when you look at its list of sponsors, which includes Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. And the list of full members is equally impressive: It includes Apple, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Twitter.
The site includes a list of best practices as well as other tips for sending proper messages, and you don’t even have to sign up to be a member — they’re free to view directly from the M3AAWG website.
FIGURE 2-4: The M3AAWG website includes links to best practices.
If you suspect that your email messages are being blocked by the intended recipient or you can’t receive email from a specific person, a good place to find out whether that's the case is the Spamhaus Project website at www.spamhaus.org (see Figure 2-5).
The Spamhaus Project is a global organization based in Andorra, a small European country that’s easy to forget (and we won’t judge you). It’s tucked away in the Pyrenees Mountains on the French/Spanish border. The word spamhaus is a made-up German expression, coined by founder Steve Linford to refer to an Internet service provider that spams or provides services to spammers.
Like M3AAWG, The Spamhaus Project has a lot of big sponsors, including Amazon Web Services, 1&1, and Rackspace. It provides a lot of free services, including the ability for you to see whether a domain name or even a specific IP address is on one of its blocklists. If you continue to receive spam, you can also see whether the sender is on the Spamhaus Project Register of Known Spam Operators database.
FIGURE 2-5: The Spamhaus Project website has links to various online resources to help you identify spammers.
Adhering to country and regional laws
If you live outside the United States, you likely have policies in your country (and perhaps your region) that will apply to your online marketing operations. This section covers the legislation in North America and Europe (and chances are that these laws have influenced online marketing laws where you live).
