Last week while Canada was busy Celebrating it’s 144th Birthday the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) gave the Email Marketing world a little gift! There draft regulations for the Canadian Anti-Spam Legislation (aka CASL).

These draft regulations address a number of items around the required content of a commercial electronic messages; Identification of the sender or entity sending the message, Postal Address, Telephone number, Email address and a Web address.

The unsubscribe mechanism is also clarified so that the actions must be able to be performed in no more than TWO clicks or another method of equivalent efficiency (i.e. Reply to unsubscribe).

The CRTC explains the requirements for a request for express consent for the sending of commercial electronic messages, A request for consent must be in writing and must be sought separately for each act described in sections 6 to 8 (Commercial Electronic Message, Altering Data transmissions and Software installation) of the Act and must include:

      1 – the name of the person seeking consent and the person, if different, on whose behalf consent is sought
      2 – if the consent is sought on behalf of another person, a statement indicating which person is seeking consent and which person on whose behalf consent is sought
      3 – if the person seeking consent and the person, if different, on whose behalf consent is sought carry on business by different names, the name by which those persons carry on business
      4 – the physical and mailing address, a telephone number providing access to an agent or a voice messaging system, an email address and a web address of the person seeking consent and, if different, the person on whose behalf consent is sought and any other electronic address used by those persons
      5 – a statement indicating that the person whose consent is sought can withdraw their consent by using any contact information referred to in the point 4.

These regulations are available online here and are open for comments from now until August 29th, 2011. I would encourage you to read and formulate a response to the CRTC about these regulations and how you feel they will affect your email marketing programs.