Have We Mastered The CAN Spam Act

A couple of days ago I decided to give my Hotmail account a little spring cleaning. I have a few e-mail accounts, but I love GMail so much that it has been my primary for more than a year now and the others have been overlooked for quite some time.

I knew that there would be an incredible amount of spam, so I decided to hit it at it's root and unsubscribe from the routine communication. I wanted to be off their list.

The thing is that I don't know what I did to opt-in to any of these communications. I've been producing e-mail newsletters for years now, but I have an editorial background, and I only asked how people opted in to the newsletters I was working on at the time.

However I got on their lists, I was on dozens. I could only remember opting in to receive coupons from the Bon Ton two years ago. If I had known they were going to e-mail me every day about their new shoe section, one day sale, etc., I wouldn't have. Barnes & Noble does a fabulous job of communicating its coupon announcements and coupon announcements only in my opinion, and I take advantage of them often. Too often.

I wasn't suprised about all the free flight e-mails. What I couldn't believe was how many retailers were violating the CAN-SPAM Act. I had been receiving at least one e-mail per week from:

Lowes
DISH Network (Direct TV)
JCPenney
Polo RalphLauren

I knew I hadn't done anything that would make my e-mail address available for their marketing purposes. I had already spent hours unsubscribing from the Bon Ton e-mails, the National Body Challenge (I fogot I went to the Discovery Channel's Web site in an effort to lose weight in January), and a host of newsletters I had actually knowingly subscribed to and never read.

So why are international retailers like Lowes, JCPenney, and Polo RalphLauren risking getting fined? If I am reading the details of the act correctly, they aren't.

I searched the 81 pages of text for a section that discussed the opt in guidelines, but the law simply discusses what the sender must do to enable to recipient to opt out. According to the legal text:

CANSPAM protects consumers’ privacy by allowing individual email recipients to choose whether to opt-out of receiving additional commercial email messages from any particular sender and by requiring commercial email messages to clearly and conspicuously disclose the opt-out mechanism.