The High-touch Legal Services® Blog…for Startups!

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Fraudulent Email Prohibitions Supplement CAN-SPAM

Cover of the California Business and Professions Code, which has a section about fraudulent emailIn Commercial E-mail and CAN-SPAM: What You Need to Know, I discussed how the federal CAN-SPAM Act makes commercial email more truthful, more transparent and more avoidable. This post addresses how California law concerning fraudulent email supplements CAN-SPAM.

In particular, this post discusses preemption, by which, under certain circumstances, U.S. federal laws can invalidate state laws that address a given subject matter. (more…)

Commercial E-mail and CAN-SPAM: What You Need to Know

Seal of the FTC Bureau of Consumer Protection, which publishes a CAN-SPAM guide for businessesUnsolicited commercial electronic mail – “spam” – is the bane of the modern electronic existence. In an effort to limit this problem, the One hundred Eighth Congress enacted the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003. This legislation, usually referred to as the “CAN-SPAM Act of 2003” or “CAN-SPAM”, took effect January 1, 2004.

The CAN-SPAM Act

CAN-SPAM has four main provisions, which together aim to make commercial email (including commercial content on websites) more truthful, more transparent and more avoidable.

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Spam Arrest: I Think I’ll Stay as Far Away as Possible

Spam Arrest logo

Today a client received an e-mail bounce-back from Spam Arrest, which provides a challenge-response system to stop automated junk mail. The first time a sender sends e-mail to a protected recipient, the sender must follow a link in the bounce-back message to a web page where, following user entry of a one-time verification code, the sender is identified as a legitimate e-mail sender.

During the past several years I have gone through the Spam Arrest verification process a few times and never thought much of it. But when I followed the link in the client’s e-mail, I saw something that, to the best of my knowledge, I had never seen before: the Sender Agreement reproduced toward the end of this post.

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