Marketers Baffled By Spam Laws

By | January 27, 2004

This new spam law, so far, is taking us nowhere.

A new survey conducted by email marketing service Blue Sky Factory reckons that nearly half of email marketers aren’t sure whether the stuff they send out is compliant and more than half admit that they do not understand the new U.S. laws (called, catchily but inaccurately, CAN-SPAM). Marketers, needless to say, aren’t happy: almost 40 percent do not believe the new laws will have a positive influence on the online relationship between businesses and their consumers. (A PDF version of the survey is available here.)

This seems to be the prevailing view at a conference in San Francisco, where WIRED reports that a lot of folk are nervous, since the law carries heavy penalties not just against marketers but the folk selling the product they’re peddling. This may be no bad thing, of course: The story quotes someone from dating site Date.com as saying his company now has a “a strict policy on privacy and bulk e-mailing” in place. Others complain that the law gives too much leeway to Internet Service Providers to block stuff that looks like spam, so they find that their emails are getting stopped even when they’re complying with CAN-SPAM.

Nowhere, so far, is mentioned the alternative: RSS. To me it seems a logical step. RSS feeds don’t get blocked, control over receiving or not receiving is in the hands of the reader, and it’s cool. Get with the program, email marketers.

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