CAN-SPAM Rules for Internet MarketersWritten by John Calder
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.netOn January 1, 2004, "CAN-SPAM Act", short for "Controlling Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003", took effect. Marketers who send any form of commercial email as defined by act will need to comply with CAN-SPAM rules in order to avoid legal consequences. The act was designed to reduce unsolicited commercial messages, sent both as email and to wireless devices such as cell phones. There is of course much debate about how effective this law will prove to be in stopping spam. After all, spammers can easily send their messages from email servers located overseas, in locations beyond effective reach of US enforcement efforts. Many marketers feel that spam will continue flooding us as ever, while legitimate, opt-in marketers, who want to comply with law, will have to jump through time-consuming and sometimes expensive extra hoops to be able to send email. In fact, many believe that act will lead to an upsurge in spam regardless, because it seems to be legal as long as it meets requirements of act. For marketers to comply with law, they need to follow some simple guidelines provided for in legislation. Virtually all marketers who run email lists are already in compliance with most of law. Generally, any business communicating with existing customers or prospects by mail must include in their emails a valid return email address that is active for at least 30 days after commercial email is sent; a physical mailing address, valid and NOT a P.O. Box; and a way for recipients to opt-out of future mailings. In addition, subject line must not be misleading or deceptive, state in some way message is an advertisement or commercial in nature, and marketer must honor opt-out requests. Again, probably none of that is too much different from what you're already doing, except perhaps for addition of physical mailing address.
| | Next-gen BitDefender solution adds heuristic spam filtersWritten by Roxana Danaila
BitDefender 8 SpamDeny, new antispam solution for Windows workstations launched today is an advanced email protection tool which features updated, as well as new filters. “I’m very satisfied with how this version has turned out, because internal testing has shown an improvement of over 35% in detection rates, over previous version. I would like to take this opportunity to thank all our users and testers, as we wouldn’t have had such a great product without their hard work, input and feedback,” said Nicolae Simon, BitDefender Product Marketing Manager.The new rules of updated Heuristic filter will dutifully trash some new scam spam types, such as Nigerian scams, online casino scams, lottery scams and fake university diploma offers, while further reducing number of false positives.
|
