Does CAN SPAM require multiple opt-outs on emails?

Today’s Wednesday question comes from M. B.

My company sometimes sends mail to our list on behalf of 3rd parties. A recent 3rd party told us that CAN SPAM requires the email contain their opt-out link as well as ours. Is this correct?”

The FTC’s most recent rulemaking says specifically that this sort of multiple opt-out is confusing for the consumer and the only company that needs to provide an opt out is the designated “sender” where “sender” is the entity in the from: line.
In my experience there are only two groups who want the multiple opt-out links in emails.
1) Folks who are new at this and don’t really understand the law and don’t do a lot of email marketing. They may have seen something, somewhere about opt-outs being required and are confused about their liabilities.
2) Groups who have been doing this a long time and who do a lot of email marketing. There are a couple reasons they do this. Sometimes they are actively trying to confuse recipients to lower the chance a recipient will successfully opt out. Sometimes they are building massive suppression lists so that they can use addresses acquired through non-permission based means (harvesting, purchasing, co-reg, whatever) more successfully. And, sometimes, they’re attempting to harvest your subscribers by taking the opt-outs from you.
For me the third party claiming that they have to put in an opt-out for them in your email is a pretty big red flag. To the extent that I would strongly reconsider moving forward advertising for them.
From a delivery standpoint, I always worry about links that go places my clients don’t control. If their unsub link goes to their domain, and they use the same domain in all their mailings, then you have no control over delivery. Your mail will share the reputation of every other bit of mail with their link in it. If some of their other partners have poor reputations, then that’s going to affect your inbox delivery for this send. It’s very unlikely this is going to cause long term delivery problems, but it may very well cause short term ones.
Also, if they are not providing you with a list of addresses that have opted out from their mailings in the past so that you can stop mailing to them, then you should wonder what they’re going to do with the opt-outs they’re going to collect from your subscribers.
As always, I’m not a lawyer, but this doesn’t fit with my understanding of CAN SPAM.

Related Posts

Unsubscribe rates as a measure of engagement.

Over at Spamtacular Mickey talks about the email marketers’ syllogism.

  1. Anyone who doesn’t want our mail will opt-out.
  2. Most people don’t opt-out.
  3. Therefore, most people want our mail.

This clearly fallacious reasoning is something I deal with frequently with my clients, particularly those who come to me for reputation repair. They can’t understand why people are calling them spammers, because their unsubscribe rates and complaint rates are very low. The low complaints and unsubscribes must mean their mail is wanted. Unfortunately, the email marketers’ syllogism leads them to faulty conclusions.
There are many reasons people don’t opt-out of mail they don’t want. Some of it may be practical, the mail never hits their inbox, either due to ISP level filters or their own personal filters. Some people take a stance that they do not opt out of mail they did not opt-in to and if they don’t recognize the company, they won’t opt-out.
In any case, low levels of opt-outs or even this-is-spam hits does not mean that recipients want that mail. The sooner marketers figure this out, the better for them and their delivery.

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Yahoo changes

Thanks to tips by a couple blog readers and some clients, I have been looking into Yahoo disabling links in the bulk folder. It does appear Yahoo is no longer allowing users to click on links in emails that Yahoo places in the bulk folder.
In fact, some of the spam in my Yahoo mailbox even has a notice about this.

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Confirmed unsubscribe

Whatever one might think about confirming opt-ins I think we can all agree that requiring someone to jump through hoops and confirm an unsubscription request will just annoy that person.
Today I attempt to opt-out from a discussion list. It’s one I *thought* I had opted out of previously, but I could find no record of the request anywhere. OK. So I imagined unsubscribing, I’ll just unsub again and keep better records.
After digging through the headers, I find the unsub link and dutifully mail off my unsubscribe request. I then receive an email that requires I click on a link to confirm my unsub request. This causes me to grumble a bit. I have heard all the arguments about forged unsub requests and the various reasons this is good practice. I believe none of them. Requiring people to confirm an unsubscription request is bad practice.
In this case, the mailing list is a discussion list so there is no CAN SPAM violation. However, I know that some commercial mailing lists have also implemented confirm your opt-out request. For commercial mailing lists, this is a CAN SPAM violation. It’s also just plain rude. If someone says, “Stop!” then you should stop, no questions asked

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