Well, I’ve put in my two cents on the FTC’s potential interpretation of the CAN-Spam act. If you do email marketing at all, this could be very important to you. You can submit your own comments at https://secure.commentworks.com/submitcomment.aspx, by email or by Priority Mail or FedEx, to ensure your comments make it in time. There is some concern that just about any form of email, even personal emails between friends, may be considered subject to CAN-Spam, which is ridiculous. Sure, we all have that friend who forwards too many jokes, but you wouldn’t call them spammers, would you?
Anyhow, here’s what I wrote. Hope I didn’t make the wrong impression:
My greatest concern is regarding the interpretation of how suppression lists must be run. There is no way to know why a customer unsubscribes. As an ezine owner, I rarely know if a subscriber unsubscribes due to not liking my content, took offense at a given ad, is receiving too much email or mistook which ezine they unsubscribed from. Odds are great that unsubscribe have nothing to do with not wanting to hear about a particular advertiser, and it seems to me that some interpretations would require that I inform all my advertisers of all unsubscribes. This violates my privacy policy, which dictates that I will not share their information with anyone.
Overzealous application of this law will put a severe damper on email affiliate marketing, which is often a legitimate form of marketing when done properly. This Act stands to punish even those who do their marketing correctly by limiting the advertisers they can use due to subscribers unsubscribing from other lists. It is an impossible standard as things stand today.
Worse, most email marketers have no way of knowing which email prompted an unsubscribe. Not all customers read their email in a timely manner, so it could potentially be an email from weeks previous that caused an unsubscribe, rather than the most recent email, making it impossible to know which advertisers need to suppress that email address.
Another problem that the technology cannot presently deal with is that viruses may randomly put addresses in the To and From fields when they send out emails, resulting in addresses being suppressed without their owners’ knowledge. This is fair to neither the advertiser nor the email address’s owner. In this I speak from experience of a sort, as a virus has been adding email addresses to my list, and catching and removing these addresses is a difficult task at best and impossible in many cases.
Worse, it is not difficult for those with the knowledge to forge email headers, creating false requests for suppression from a competitor’s list, effectively ruining a competitor’s ability to market using email, no matter how carefully they maintain their list. How difficult would it be for a spammer to get into a suppression list, given the numerous cases of computers and websites being hacked? Suppression lists are far from an ideal solution for handling this problem, much as I could wish to suggest a better one.
I think it is very important to keep in mind when interpreting this Act that opt-in lists are quite different from spam. Many, possibly most, include some form of advertising, and suppression lists would be impossible to maintain. I therefore think it is vital that all opt-in lists be considered “relational” or “transactional” messages. This is important even if the list being subscribed to is in fact commercial in intent. Email users subscribe and unsubscribe for many different reasons. Some want to be notified of sales, others of events, and still others want only information. So long as the email owner opts in to the list, I do not believe this Act should apply to the list.
For email marketers such as myself, sharing information with my subscribers is the primary goal of my list; selling something is secondary. All my subscribers are double opt-in, yet I still find a great deal to concern me regarding the potential interpretations of this Act. Subscribers may attempt to unsubscribe using the wrong email address, a not terribly uncommon occurrence, leaving the publisher with no way to know that another email address should have been removed.
I sincerely hope the Commission will consider how an email list is built when considering how to enforce this Act. Accurate labeling is vital in the implementation of this Act, both for the sake of reducing true spam and allowing the Internet to thrive as the marketplace of both ideas and merchandise it has become.
Here’s hoping the FTC is rational with this! Otherwise, I think I may ditch the newsletter to RSS, which would really cut down on the number of subscribers I have, since very few use it yet. But it would be safer.
