Recipients need to be able to unsubscribe

The The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) announced today that Plentyoffish Media paid a $48,000 fine for CASL violations. According to the  CRTC news release, Plentyoffish Media was failing to allow consumers to unsubscribe from mail in compliance with CASL.
CASL requires that any commercial electronic email message contain an easy and free unsubscribe mechanism. Plentyoffish sent mail to its members without an unsubscribe mechanism. According to their webpage (HT: Sanket) there were some messages that users were unable to opt-out of without closing their account.

You can stop message notifications (sent out when you get a message) in Mail Settings. Unfortunately you cannot stop the “latest match” emails – if these are a problem we’ll delete your account upon request. PoF FAQ.

There are a couple of takeaways here.
The first is that, again, the CRTC did not impose the highest fine possible. When the law came into effect, there were some concerns that the CRTC would be driving companies out of business by imposing maximum fines for CASL violations. While we only have two enforcement actions, neither of them involved the maximum fine, even when there was a blatant violation of the law. This isn’t a law being enforced in a way that is going to destroy email marketing a we know it. Instead, the law is being used to protect consumer interests.
The other is more a more general point. Some senders don’t want to provide opt-outs for customers. This sounds great for the sender. But failing to offer an unsubscribe link from mail can result in delivery problems. The free webmail providers and many of the cable companies track “this is spam” hits and automatically direct future mail from that sender to the recipient’s bulk folder. Recipients can also create filters and totally block mail from senders.
When senders control the opt-out, rather than relying on FBLs and complaints, it gives them more control over their mail stream. They can attempt to re-engage users through non-email channels and recapture that subscriber at a later date. When the mail is going to the bulk folder based on user filters, the user has to actively change the filter to start receiving the mail again.
Overall, letting recipients unsubscribe, even from mail senders don’t think they should unsubscribe from is a net benefit to senders. In the case of Plentyoffish Media, it would have saved them nearly 50,000 dollars.

When spam filters fail
We're all targets

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August 2014: The Month in Email

Isn’t August the month where things are supposed to slow down? We’re still waiting for that to happen around here… it’s been great to be busy, but we’re hoping to continue to carve out more time for blogging as we move into the fall.
August
As usual, we reported on a mix of industry trends and news, the persistence of spam, and did a deep dive into an interesting technical topic. Let’s start there: Steve wrote a post explaining Asynchronous Bounces (yes, it’s a GNFAB), with some examples of how they’re used and how they can cause operational problems.
In industry news, we did a roundup post of some Gmail changes and a followup post on security issues with non-Latin characters in addresses. We also celebrated the long-awaited release of a wonderful resource from MAAWG that I am very proud to have helped author, the white paper Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link). We receive dozens of these calls every week, and though we are always happy to help people solve urgent delivery crises, we spend most of our consulting time and attention working with people to build sustainable email programs, so this document is a great “self-service” resource for people looking to troubleshoot blocklist issues on their own.
In other industry and MAAWG-related news, we noted that the nomination period for the J.D. Falk award has opened (you have just a few more days, procrastinators) and took a moment to reminisce about our friend J.D. and his incredible contributions to the field.
On the topic of creating, sending, and reading more attractive email, we posted some  resources from Mailchimp and crowdsourcing templates from Send With Us. We also incorrectly reported on a not-actually-new interface from AOL, Alto. Interesting to note that there’s been so little followup from AOL (and almost no post-launch coverage) in the two years since launch.
We also touched on a few myths: email saves trees and low complaint volume is good.
And finally, in November of 2013, I unsubscribed from every possible email I received on a specific account. I followed up on that briefly in a Part 2 post, and this month went back and wrote a Part 3 followup. Spoiler alert: spam is still a problem. Of course, we got some comments that we were probably doing it wrong, so Unsubscribe Barbie showed up to add her thoughts. We try not to be snarky around here, but sometimes we just don’t try very hard.

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Some email related news

A couple links to relevant things that are happening in email.
M3AAWG released the Help! I’m on a Blocklist! (PDF link) doc this week. This is the result of 4 years worth of work by a whole lot of people at M3AAWG. I was a part of the working group (“doc champion” in M3AAWG parlance) and want to thank everyone who was involved and contributed to the process. I am very excited this was approved and published so people can take advantage of the collective wisdom of M3AAWG participants.
In other announcements, Gmail announced today on their Google+ page that that they were putting a new “unsubscribe” link next to the sender name when mail is delivered to the Promotions, Social or Forums tab. This appears to be the official announcement of the functionality they announced at the SF M3AAWG last February. It likely means that all users are currently getting the “unsubscribe” link. What Gmail doesn’t mention in that blog post is that this functionality uses the “List-Unsubscribe” header, not the link in the email, but I don’t think anyone except bulk mailers really care about how it’s being done, just that it is.
Also today Gmail announced they were going to recognize usernames with non-Latin or accented characters in the name. Eventually, they claim, they’ll also allow people to get Gmail addresses with accented characters.

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CRTC fines Compu-Finder $1.1 million for CASL violations

The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) is the principle agency tasked with enforcing Canada’s anti-spam law. Today they issued a Notice of Violation to Compu-Finder  including a $1.1 million dollar fine for 4 violations of CASL. The violations include sending unsolicited email and having a non-working unsubscribe link. According to the CRTC, complaints about Compu-Finder accounted for 26% of all complaints submitted about this industry sector.
This is the first major fine announced under CASL.
One of the first things that jumped out at me about this is the action was taken against B2B mail. There are a lot of senders out there who think nothing of sending unsolicited emails to business addresses. In my experience, many B2B senders think permission is much less important for them than B2C senders. I think that this enforcement action demonstrates that, at least to the CRTC, permission is required for B2B mail.
The other thing that jumped out is that given the extent of the complaints (26%) the financial penalties were only slightly more than 10% of the $10M maximum penalty. It seems the CRTC is not blindly applying the maximum penalty, but is instead actually applying some discretion to the fines.
I’ve looked for the actual notice of violation, but haven’t been able to find a copy. If I find it, I will share.
 
 
 
 

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