Email Marketing Knowledge Base: A Guide to the CAN-SPAM Act By Karrie Beth At Isnare.com Ezine Articles

One of the first pieces of information that you will find in any email marketing knowledge base is the CAN SPAM act. This act was a response to the rampant practice of spamming that was numbering billions of mails daily all over the world. In addition to this, the bandwidth costs that are associated with downloading spam mails and the loss of mailbox space all became major irritants and people cried out for help. The CAN SPAM act itself is a bit controversial in that it tries to walk the fine line between allowing free trade and protecting mailbox users. Basically, the act allows people to send each other unsolicited mails but within certain limits. It is tough to say that this has had any effect on the industry and any drop in the amount spam traffic is probably because of the effect of spam filters.

The CAN SPAM act’s first and most important tenet is the banning of harvested email addresses. Before this law, spammers used to acquire email addresses by deploying spider software to scour the net for email addresses dropped around. This in addition to spammers selling mail addresses amongst themselves. Any email marketing database will tell you that the way out in this case is to simply ask the users if they would like to receive email updates and sales promotion notices through email. It is interesting to note that the CAN SPAM act does not actively prohibit unsolicited mailing but does bring those who do it under the scanner.

Subject lines are the next piece that is covered in the CAN SPAM act and the law states that all subject lines have to be accurate and state the exact purpose of the email that is sent to the recipient. This means that if the email is an advertisement of some kind, then a special prefix has to be added to the subject line. Likewise the sending of adult material is largely banned because of the possibility of minors receiving mails that are meant for adults. If not totally rendered illegal prefixes are warranted in this case as well.

How email is sent is also well detailed out here. There is some history behind this fact as well. Spammers never bear the cost of sending an email. This is because they used to gain a back door entry into mail servers called open relay servers and end up sending mails to all who used that server. This practice was outlawed and as any email knowledge base will tell you, the use of an open relay is now history. It is mandated in the CAN SPAM act that sending emails must be done from a valid IP address.

It is debatable to state that this law has actually curbed the spread of spam but the latest figures on spam traffic do indicate a moderate decrease. Whether this is because of better legislation or better spam filters being able to identify spam mail is a matter that is still under discussion.

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