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Spam Lawsuits – What’s the worst that can happen?

February 15th, 2009 | by Ben

If you’ve ever started an email marketing project and dealt with a client (or manager) who told you, “Look, we’re not spammers here, so we don’t have to worry about those CAN-SPAM laws” we’ve created some handy “stfu” documents you can give ‘em. They list big brands who’ve had to pay some huge settlements to the FTC for seemingly simple, innocent mistakes (that a lot of us have made), like:

  • Forgetting to include physical mailing address in the email footer
  • Failure to properly clean unsubscribers from a list
  • Misuse of the word “free” in subject lines
  • Not warning about inappropriate content in your subject lines

The documents are located under the “MailChimp Experts” group in the MailChimp Jungle community.

UPDATE: Or, you can download it here:

icon-spamlawsuits

The content is nothing new, as links to these lawsuits are all over the interwebs. But we just wanted to put it in a handy, printable guide. I’ve also included some little tips on “how this could happen to you” plus some food for thought at the end.

It makes a great gift for clueless clients, stubborn managers, and over aggressive sales people. Or, just print out a copy and drop it on your company lawyer’s desk.

Update: Rob Hassett, from InternetLegal.com, has contributed a couple topics on “Non-profits are not exempt” and “Affirmatve consent does not create an exemption from CAN-SPAM.”

While you’re perusing the MailChimp Jungle, be sure to check out Isabel’s collaboration for an email marketing project contract, and Tanya’s Yahoo Shortcuts discovery.

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5 Comments

    • Tim says:

      Most of the stuff in canspam is pretty obvious, but I had no clue about the mailing address requirement. Thanks for helping to educate about these things.

    • Larry Kilbourne says:

      Ben – Great advice, and it can’t be repeated (or re-printed) too often. I know of an instance where one of the world’s largest sellers of IT management software got blacklisted by ISPs for 90 days because they got careless with their unsubscribe (opt-out) list and ran afoul of the CAN-SPAM laws. That really hurt, and it was entirely preventable.

      • Ben says:

        Yeah, it never ceases to amaze me when people send spam to IT people. If you can pick a segment of the population to NEVER, EVER piss off with spam, that would pretty much be the one.

    • Justin says:

      Hi Ben-

      I’m working with my first email campaign client (a bank) and am trying to get grounded in all this compliance stuff. They just asked me if I have a sample CanSPAM policy that we can use for their company (apparently it was recommended by the FDIC). Is that like a privacy policy for a website? I’ve been looking around but don’t see any examples of this. My guess it’s not something they have to have, but rather adhere to.

      Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

      -Justin

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