From time to time we get questions from our members and we will try to answer many of them here.

I work for an organization that has a "community" portion of its site. People sign up and among the "benefits" they get is a newsletter. There is no way to opt out of this newsletter and we get a lot of complaints about it. This organization is run by an individual who would not be likely to listen to any employee who pointed out that an opt out or unsubscribe option would not only be courteous but also probably less illegal than what we're doing now.

Q: How can we shake the boss up to alert her to the fact that people should be able to unsubscribe?

A: The practise of sending email newsletters without and unsubscribe is Illegal under the CAN SPAM act. This can result in mailings to members that actually want to receive these communications to go missing. Worse yet it may result in heavy fines and other possible legal actions if this is intentionally ignored or omitted.

Here is a summery article that talks about the CAN spam law and the requirements of a mailer: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Here's a rundown of the law's main provisions:

• It bans false or misleading header information.
• It prohibits deceptive subject lines.
• It requires that your email give recipients an opt-out method.
• It requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender's valid physical postal address.

Penalties

* Each violation of the above provisions is subject to fines of up to $11,000.

Q: If I give you the company information, can you get in touch with her?

A: We know several great consultants that work in the field of email marketing we can point you in the right direction for that. However, if your worried about telling this to your employeer yourself... Will they listen to anyone else?

CAUCE board member Ray Everett Church writes at internetnews.com:

According to the majority of the testimony at this month’s “Spam Summit,” held by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), the state of the fight against spam is pretty much the same as it has been for the last several years.

The two days of presentations can largely be boiled down to the following bullets:

• Spam volumes continue to increase, being driven by the growth of “botnets” – networks of hijacked computers run by hackers and rented out to spammers.
  

• Spam is one of many high-tech tools being used by organized crime, international terrorist organizations, and can be expected to play a major role in future conflicts between nations.
  

• Anti-spam technologies are improving, but deployment of sophisticated technologies such as cryptographic-based email authentication is sorely lacking.

Oh, and the spam wars are a lot less exciting than they used to be. Case in point: unlike last time, there were no fist-fights at this year’s shindig. ...

Read the rest at Internetnews.com

The following speech was prepared with the intention of using portions of it during the FTC Spam Summit, but CAUCE was not given the opportunity to participate due to time constraints.

My name is Neil Schwartzman. Beyond — as I noted yesterday — representing Return Path Inc. here at this conference, I have a second life, as it were, as the Executive Director of CAUCE in North America. CAUCE is the Coalition Against Unsolicited Commercial Email, a consumers' rights advocacy group.

I am here today to question. Yesterday we heard how the tenor of the discussion about spam became more mature. How, in the period of time that has elapsed since the last summit, things have developed as an industry.

That may be true, but I question if the discussion at hand here this week is truly a big tent effort.

I see few anti-spammers here. I see only one blacklist operator, and no filtering service providers here. I see no consumer organizations here. Heck, I don't see but one spammer on the panels. I didn't see anyone challenge him during his attempts to cast himself as a legitimate business man, no-one mentioned his attempts to bribe staff at at least one large receiving site to accept his mail, or his efforts to open a school for spammers. Where is former FTC Commissioner Orson Swindle and his "couple of public hangings" when you need him, and them?