On January 26th, at the Canadian Institute’s Advertising & Marketing Law Conference, I presented the following presentation alongside Wally Hill – VP Public Affairs and Communications from the Canadian Marketing Association – where we discussed the current status of Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (CASL), provided some guidance for compliance as the law and regulations as they are now drafted, comparisons to...

Tonight I joined a good friend and co-worker, and one of his friends (we will call him Dave for this story), for dinner and drinks after work. As per the norm with many conversations (I’m sure you can relate to this) the conversation eventually drifted to email where a recent event story came up. Dave told me about a recent phone call with an email list vendor where they were offering services to Help build a contact and mailing...

Facebook announced yesterday that they were adding the functionality for Application and Facebook connect developers to begin collecting email addresses of their users, in some cases event requiring the email address be supplied to access the application. You can call me a pessimist but I have a feeling this opens a whole new can of worms for the Millions of Facebook users that are visiting and participating in the use of applications...

I received a great question about the Electronic Commerce Protection Act (Bill C-27) currently working it’s way through the Canadian Parliament. Q:What does this mean for US companies which have Canadians on their list? It looks like the ECPA (pronounced Eck-Pa) has a slightly more rigid permission rule than CAN SPAM (implied consent is not exactly opt out). So if I have Canadians on my file, and don’t have ZIP or Country, will I...

Q: Dear EmailKarma.net, We’ve been sending confirmation emails with a thumbnail view of one of our newsletter articles the registrants will receive as part of our email program. What are the ramifications of switching the article thumbnail for a thumbnail of one of the actual offers that we would be sending? Here are a sample of what we are considering: Thank you for opting in to receive our email communications. To complete the...

Smith-Harmon, reciently announced the release of the Retail Welcome Email Benchmark Study.  Taking a look at welcome email programs and best practices among a number of major online retailers. Given the opportunity to build trust between the consumer and the marketers, it’s unfortunate that so many still don’t seem to be taking advantage of these messaging programs. Smith-Harmon’s study of the welcome programs of 112 of the...