FTC Survey Tests Top E-Tailers’ Compliance with Can-spam’s Opt-Out Provisions   - 1,210 Views,

The CAN-SPAM Act, which became effective January 1, 2004, requires that senders of commercial e-mail provide recipients with a clear and conspicuous notice that they have the right to opt out of receiving future marketing messages, provide a mechanism to allow them to exercise that right, and honor requests to be removed from future mailings.

To assess whether e-tailers were complying with the opt-out provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act, FTC staff developed a list of 100 top e-tailers – those who make significant use of the Internet to market their goods or services – and visited their sites. Most of the sites solicited consumers to sign up for special offers, promotions, updates and newsletters via e-mail. FTC staff created three new e-mail accounts and opted in to receive the offers and promotions once for each of the three e-mail accounts and monitored the accounts for six weeks. Then staff notified the e-tailers they wished to stop receiving commercial e-mail messages.

The study showed a high rate of compliance with the CAN-SPAM opt-out provisions. All of the e-tailers who sent e-mail to the FTC accounts provided clear notice of recipients’ right to opt out of receiving future mail and provided recipients with an opt-out mechanism. Eighty nine percent of the e-tailers honored all three of the opt-out requests made by FTC staff and 93 percent complied with opt-out requests for at least some accounts.

Copies of the report are available from the FTC’s Web site at http://www.ftc.gov