CAN-SPAM is a U.S. law that was put into place in 2003 and stands for Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing. CAN-SPAM established requirements for commercial messages, gives recipients the right to have you stop emailing them, and has tough penalties for violations.

CAN-SPAM was designed to widen the gap between legitimate email marketers (like you) and the dredges of the junk-mail underbelly (not you). The law gives everyone four months to be compliant, does not apply to “relationship” emails (like account updates or invoices you send to paying customers or newsletters you send to paying subscribers) but squarely targets “commercial” emails — basically, any email designed to promote a product or service. As you have hopefully realized, you are likely in this category, so here are the 5 basics aspects of the law and what they mean to you.

The 5 essentials of being CAN-SPAM compliant

Here are the main elements of CAN-SPAM that will keep your email marketing worry-free.

1. Clearly identify yourself

The main thrust of CAN-SPAM is to prevent people from sending fraudulent, deceptive emails. So the law begins with the obvious: If you send a commercial email, make sure recipients know who sent it. Your sender name and email address should be accurate, honest, and allow people to email you back.

2. Clearly identify the content of your email

Again, this is designed to combat deceptive emails. CAN-SPAM prohibits the use of misleading subject lines in commercial emails and calls for advertisement emails to be clearly marked as such, though the law does not call for any specific method (like including “ADV” in the subject line). Crafting clear, concise, and honest subject lines is something any serious communicator / marketer should be doing anyway.

3. Don’t use questionable tactics to build your audience list

This is aimed at junk mailers who grab email addresses off the web using a robotic script, or who create “dictionary attacks” to randomly generate addresses. Clearly, those aren’t safe or positive practices. These practices also leave anyone who is grabbing email addresses one by one without a script in a big gray area, which is one of the many reasons we strongly advise against that. As long as you’re sending to people with whom you have a business relationship (or who have actively requested your emails), you have nothing to worry about.

4. Give recipients the ability to contact you directly

Your recipients need to be able to contact you in two ways, by emailing you back using your ‘from’ address or by contacting you the old-fashioned way using your physical address. Unlike junk mailers who are doing everything they can to hide, you’re doing everything you can to be noticed, to encourage your subscribers to click, call, email, or visit. To ensure compliance, your contact information is hard-coded into the footer of every campaign.

5. Give recipients the ability to unsubscribe at any time

CAN-SPAM requires that you offer a clear and visible opt-out feature and, more importantly, that you honor all such requests within 10 days. Our TrueRemove™ feature makes sure every email you send contains that opt-out link and that any opt-out requests you receive are immediate and permanent. We also keep a permanent record of opt-out addresses in your account, just to make sure no one accidentally sends to that person ever again.