CAN- SPAM is a piece of legislation that was enacted by the US congress in an effort to reign in the practice of spamming. The act is actually quite controversial with the anti-spam lobby calling it one of the most spamming friendly laws with some actually calling it the US government's collusion with commercial spamming agencies. However supporters of the law cite that the relative freedoms to spammers provided by the law also provide a tracking mechanism to arrest the spread of spam.

Curiously, the amount of spam has reduced since the inception of the act; whether this is a result of reclassification of spam as legal or a result of close monitoring is a matter of conjecture. Whatever the end result, email campaigns have to be CAN-SPAM compliant and email campaign software has to be reconfigured, if not already, to the three guiding principles of the law.

CAN-SPAM's first base is the unsubscribe compliance clause. This is a backdoor or an emergency exit for most people who do not wish to receive spam. This clause states that the email must clearly have an option that allows the user to unsubscribe from a mailing list.

This request has to be complied within ten days from receipt of the request. The email campaign software must then only maintain the users email address for compliance purposes and never use it for any other purpose

The third clause regards the sending mechanism with restrictions in the use of open relay, the use of a false header, and using harvested email addresses. Any email that subscribes to these guidelines is then completely free to be distributed to any mail recipient without facing the legal appellation of spam.


About the Author

By Jamie Colbs. Jamie Colbs is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service.

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