What Every Emailer Needs to Know About CAN-SPAM and Email Deliverability

Tom Reichard
iData Technologies

The Federal law officially titled “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003” but more commonly referred to as CAN-SPAM became effective on January 1, 2004 after findings by congress that:

1. Email has become very important to both commercial and personal purposes.
2. The efficiency and convenience of email is threatened by rapid growth of spam.
3. The receipt of spam represents an expense to the recipient.
4. Spam makes email less convenient and efficient.
5. Some spam contains vulgar or pornographic content.
6. Spam imposes significant costs on ISP’s, businesses and institutions.
7. Many spammers disguise the source of the spam.
8. Many spam messages have intentionally misleading subject lines.
9. Many spammers include no “opt-out” mechanism or do not honor opt-out requests.
10. Many spammers use computer programs to harvest email addresses from websites.
11. Many states have enacted spam laws, but they do not appear to be successful.
12. To solve the problem of spam, cooperation with other countries will be necessary.

In light of those findings, one may assume that congress would have passed a law that seeks to prohibit the practice of spamming. That, however, is not the case. In fact, every major anti-spam organization opposed the law, which was dubbed by them as the “YOU-CAN-SPAM” act because it legalizes spamming. While that is true, the fact is that in addition to outlawing various fraudulent practices in which spammers have typically engaged, the law establishes requirements with which the sender of “commercial email messages” must comply. It is important that every business who uses email understand what kind of email is subject to the law, and what the law requires of that email.

You must register to view the complete text of this article.