List Owners, Senders, and List Rental (oh my)

DISCLAIMER: I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice.

Last week the FTC approved a new rule provision under the CAN-SPAM act. The ruling specifically addressed multiple senders and who could be a sender and also alluded to the concept of list ownership. Based on the combination of these things list rental can fall into a gray area.

If you aren’t advertising in a list rental email, even though you are the list owner, you may not be able to be considered the sender. This has a few interesting implications. Can the list owner be the branding in the from line? Can you, or even should you offer an opt-out mechanism? All of these also carry deliverability implications as well. For instance, if the branding must be based on the renter, your authentication may be broken. Senders might not be able to capitalize on personal whitelisting, which bypasses some filtering. If it isn’t possible to be completely opted out of the list owner’s emails via an unsub link, that will lead to an increase in complaints.

To me the best solution to this dilemma from a deliverability standpoint would be make sure to brand your emails in such a way as the list owner can be perceived as an advertiser. If the list owner can be considered an advertiser in the email they would be able to be the designated sender. As the designated sender you can reap the benefits of the changes in the CAN-SPAM clarifications. But equally important is the fact that it allows you to capitalize on your own branding to potentially boost response for your advertisers.

Yahoo Drops Paragraph Spacing

According to this entry on the Email Standards Project blog, Yahoo has changed how they render messages. Yahoo no longer inserts space between paragraphs, so it may be necessary to include a margin of 1em to give some spacing. "The Email Standards Project is about working with email client developers and the design community to improve web standards support and accessibility in email." They have a number of useful articles about rendering across platforms including this one about Outlook 2007.

FTC Approves New Rule Provision Under The CAN-SPAM Act

The FTC has announced that it is publishing clarifications to the CAN-SPAM act. The primary focus of the clarifications are (per the FTC release):

(1) an e-mail recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her e-mail address and opt-out preferences, or take any steps other than sending a reply e-mail message or visiting a single Internet Web page to opt out of receiving future e-mail from a sender;
(2) the definition of "sender" was modified to make it easier to determine which of multiple parties advertising in a single e-mail message is responsible for complying with the Act’s opt-out requirements;
(3) a "sender" of commercial e-mail can include an accurately-registered post office box or private mailbox established under United States Postal Service regulations to satisfy the Act’s requirement that a commercial e-mail display a "valid physical postal address"; and
(4) a definition of the term "person" was added to clarify that CAN-SPAM’s obligations are not limited to natural persons.

Read the press release here, and the full document is available here.