How are your mails perceived?

When it comes to matters of deliverability, CAN-SPAM is merely a starting point. I once had a teacher that told me to look at laws as the bare minimum of acceptable activity. If you want people to respect you, invite you in, or simply not ignore what you have to say, people know that they have to go above what the law outlines. Things like manners, ethics and values often exceed legal expectations in terms of personal interactions. The same should be true of email legal compliance.

CAN-SPAM outlines a number of policies for senders of mail in the US and there are a myriad of international laws on the matter as well. The more important issue to senders than “can I legally do this”, is “how will sending this be perceived”. Receiving servers can block email for any number of reasons ultimately lumped together as, ‘we are trying to protect our users’. An email can be legally compliant and still find itself directed to the junk folder or worse blocked. We recently encountered a case of blocking based on URLs because they perceived emails sent from that domain as not being compliant, even though the sender responsible may in fact have been following legally acceptable practices.

The FTC certainly seems to be moving toward interpreting can-spam as a transparency issue. If it isn't clear and obvious and easy, it could be viewed as non-compliant. More importantly, however, is the damage done to the reputation of both your brand and your IP addresses if things like unsubscribing are not simple and quickly observed.