Compliant e-Mail Practices

In efforts to reduce printing costs and “go green,” your school might have decided to make the switch to primarily electronic communications. As Business Manager, you probably don’t have a lot of influence over what promotional material is distributed to whom, but it is part of your job as your school’s Risk Manager to know what practices are legally compliant, reducing your risks of law suits, and which practices are not.

E-mail is federally regulated just as traditional snail-mail is. The CAN-SPAM Act applies to all electronic messages that are sent for the purpose of promotion and advertisement. However, because your school is a business, your messages will primarily be considered promotional. If your messages are not meeting compliance, you’re risking considerable fines.

Each individual e-mail sent on behalf of your school that’s found in violation of the CAN-SPAM Act is subject to penalties of up to $16,000.

Compliance isn’t difficult. The Bureau of Consumer Protection has outlined the CAN-SPAM Act’s main requirements. The following points should be shared with everyone involved in your school’s marketing to ensure your practices are safe.

1. Don’t use false or misleading header information. Your “From,” “To,” “Reply-To,” and routing information—including the originating domain name and e-mail address —must be accurate and identify the person or business that initiated the message.
2. Don’t use deceptive subject lines. The subject line must accurately reflect the content of the message.
3. Identify the message as an ad. The law gives you a lot of leeway in how to do this, but you must disclose clearly and conspicuously that your message is an advertisement.
4. Tell recipients where you’re located. Your message must include your valid physical postal address. This can be your current street address, a post office box you’ve registered with the U.S. Postal Service, or a private mailbox you’ve registered with a commercial mail-receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations.
5. Tell recipients how to opt out of receiving future e-mail from you. Your message must include a clear and conspicuous explanation of how the recipient can opt out of getting e-mail from you in the future. Craft the notice in a way that’s easy for an ordinary person to recognize, read, and understand. Creative use of type size, color, and location can improve clarity. Give a return e-mail address or another easy Internet-based way to allow people to communicate their choice to you. You may create a menu to allow a recipient to opt out of certain types of messages, but you must include the option to stop all commercial messages from you. Make sure your spam filter doesn’t block these opt-out requests.
6. Honor opt-out requests promptly. Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an e-mail address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply e-mail or visiting a single page on an Internet Web site as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their e-mail addresses, even in the form of a mailing list. The only exception is that you may transfer the addresses to a company you’ve hired to help you comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.
7. Monitor what others are doing on your behalf. The law makes clear that, even if you hire another company to handle your email marketing, you can’t contract away your legal responsibility to comply with the law. Both the company whose product is promoted in the message and the company that actually sends the message may be held legally responsible.