Abiding Electronic Spam Laws

In the early 2000's in the US and more recently in Canada governments have implemented laws to protect peoples from receiving electronic spam emails. There are 3 main areas to follow when you wish to send e-blasts or newsletters to your customers or site vistors:

1. Consent.
2. Identification.
3. Opt-out option.

Canadian Legislation: https://www.ic.gc.ca/eic/site/ecic-ceac.nsf/eng/gv00521.html 
American Legislation: http://www.fcc.gov/guides/spam-unwanted-text-messages-and-email

Consent

You must only send newsletters to users that have asked to be emailed. In SiteApex the best way to do this is by having a form built to collect emails and place it on your website. This way site visitors will sign up to your newsletter voluntary. You can find help on setting up forms here: http://support.siteapex.com/website-administration-c12.php?iaCurrentCatID=8 

Identification

When creating a Newsletter (How to Create a Newsletter) there are a couple ways to identify yourself:

• Clearly identify yourself in the From name and/or in the Subject line of your Newsletter
• There is a mandatory "Company" field where you can at the very least place the name of your business or organization and if available a physical address.

Opting Out of a Newsletter - Unsubscribing

By default when sending a Newsletter Siteapex will include a link at the bottom of your Newsletter to allow users to opt-out/unsubscribe from that Newsletter list. These are kept track of in the Newsletter module for your viewing.

Confirming Subscriber Consent To Continue Receiving Emails

There may be times where you need to confirm your subscribers wish to continue receiving emails from you. The easiest way to do follow these steps.

1. Create a "Thank you for Confirming" website page in the sitemap area of your website. Set it up as reference page if you do not want this page to appear in your website's menu.

2. Write a newsletter asking your subscribers to confirm. In the newsletter, create a click through link to the "Thank you for confirming" page you created in step 1.

3. Send the newsletter as your normally would.

4. After a couple of days, check the list of click throughs.

5. Copy and paste the list of completed click throughs into a spreadsheet, then save the list as a csv file type.

6. Import the list of confirmed users into a new user group. You can call this group whatever you like, but you may wish to use a name like "Confirmed subscribers" so you know this group has confirmed they wish to continue receiving emails from you.