Following anti-spam laws

Before you contact your community members, ensure that you are compliant with the current anti-spam regulations for your region.

For Canada, the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL) came into effect on July 1, 2014, which requires that you must comply with the following:

• Consent
  You must have express or implied consent to send a commercial electronic message.
• Identification
  You must clearly identify yourself and the business or organization sending the commercial electronic message.
• An Unsubscribe Mechanism
  You must include an unsubscribe mechanism on every commercial electronic message sent.

At a base minimum, you should be following CAN-SPAM (Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003), the US anti-spam regulation. Most countries that have anti-spam regulations incorporate all of the requirements of CAN-SPAM, so the CAN-SPAM compliance criteria can be applied to electronic messages sent to outside of the US as well.

The following are the compliance criteria for CAN-SPAM:

• The subject line should accurately explain the nature of the message.  
  For example, stating “Click here to win prizes” is considered a deceptive subject line as it does not represent the nature of the message. A more appropriate subject line is “Brief survey on your recent shopping experience”.
• The opt-out link should be visible and functioning.  
  Fortunately, this is automatically inserted into every email deployment so clients do not have to be concerned about this requirement.
• Every email should have a physical address at the bottom.  
  Please note, the use of P.O. boxes is permitted but strongly discouraged since spammers use P.O. boxes. For blind studies, please use one of Alida’s office locations.