Eric Butow - Digital Etiquette For Dummies

Combo guidelines: What happens if your email contains both commercial content and one or both of the other two types of content? The primary purpose of the message decides: If the email Subject line and/or body of the message would cause the recipient to conclude that the message is of a commercial nature, the message falls under the CAN-SPAM Act.

Who’s responsible?: If your message is sent by more than one company, such as one designed to announce a partnership between you and other companies to sell products, you can have one of the other companies send the message for CAN-SPAM compliance.The From line in the message must be from an account with that other company and must comply with all other CAN-SPAM requirements. If they don’t, all the companies listed in the message will be held liable, so be sure that the other company knows CAN-SPAM backward and forward.

Forward properly: Speaking of forwarding, if you want to have a message with a link to invite readers to forward your email to a friend, the sender may be required to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.Has the person or company selling the product or service offered to pay the forwarder in some way, such as with a cash payment or in exchange for a benefit such as driving traffic to the forwarder’s website? Then the seller is the person or company responsible for following CAN-SPAM guidelines.

If you want to view the FAQs in their entirety to gather more information and see examples, head on over to the FTC: www.ftc.gov/tips-advice/business-center/guidance/can-spam-act-compliance-guide-business .

If your industry has any specific email-sending regulations, contact the industry groups you’re affiliated with to find out whether they have any guidelines. Hopefully, they post any information on their website, but if not, a quick email or phone call may identify issues you need to be aware of.

In addition to checking online communication rules in your industry, you should look at organizations dedicated to fighting villains such as malware, spam, and viruses and to creating better online communication. The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is one such organization, but because that’s a mouthful, the group also goes by the abbreviation M 3AAWG, which is only slightly easier to remember, let alone say. Fortunately, after you type www.m3aawg.org (see Figure 2-4) into the address bar, you can bookmark the page and forget the URL.

You know that the M 3AAWG is a serious effort when you look at its list of sponsors, which includes Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. And the list of full members is equally impressive: It includes Apple, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Twitter.

The site includes a list of best practices as well as other tips for sending proper messages, and you don’t even have to sign up to be a member — they’re free to view directly from the M 3AAWG website.

FIGURE 2-4:The M 3AAWG website includes links to best practices.

If you suspect that your email messages are being blocked by the intended recipient or you can’t receive email from a specific person, a good place to find out whether that's the case is the Spamhaus Project website at www.spamhaus.org (see Figure 2-5).

The Spamhaus Project is a global organization based in Andorra, a small European country that’s easy to forget (and we won’t judge you). It’s tucked away in the Pyrenees Mountains on the French/Spanish border. The word spamhaus is a made-up German expression, coined by founder Steve Linford to refer to an Internet service provider that spams or provides services to spammers.

Like M 3AAWG, The Spamhaus Project has a lot of big sponsors, including Amazon Web Services, 1&1, and Rackspace. It provides a lot of free services, including the ability for you to see whether a domain name or even a specific IP address is on one of its blocklists. If you continue to receive spam, you can also see whether the sender is on the Spamhaus Project Register of Known Spam Operators database.

FIGURE 2-5:The Spamhaus Project website has links to various online resources to help you identify spammers.

The Spamhaus Project also has some interesting infobits about spam, including the fact that 80 percent of spam can be traced to 100 known spam operators in the Register of Known Spam Operators.

If you live outside the United States, you likely have policies in your country (and perhaps your region) that will apply to your online marketing operations. This section covers the legislation in North America and Europe (and chances are that these laws have influenced online marketing laws where you live).

If you want to see a comprehensive list of spam legislation by country, start with the Wikipedia website article at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam:legislation_by_country . From there, you should be able to find the legislation that applies to your country.

You may have heard a lot about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known by its abbreviation, GDPR. The GDPR is a regulation touted by the GDPR website at https://gdpr.eu (see Figure 2-6) as being the toughest privacy-and-security law in the world.

FIGURE 2-6:The GDPR has a comprehensive website to answer your questions.

Like similar laws in the US, the GDPR lays out seven principles for protecting data:

Your processes must be lawful, fair, and transparent.

You must process data for legitimate purposes directly related to the subject of that data.

You should collect and process only as much data as you need for your purposes and not one bit more.

You must keep personal data accurate and updated.

You should store personally identifiable data only as long as you need for your specified purpose.Any data processing you carry out must ensure security, integrity, and confidentiality, such as by using strong encryption.

The person responsible for managing the data — the data controller , in GDPR terminology — must be able to demonstrate GDPR compliance.

What we list here only scratches the surface. You can view the latest news about GDPR and get all your questions answered (and then some) on the GDPR website at https://gdpr.eu .

If you do business in the European Union, or you plan to, you’re also bound by the rules in the GDPR. So, if you’re not familiar with those rules, now is a great time to put down this book and do some research. We’ll be here when you return.