A definition of Email Marketing Services would be: Software which manages your electronic marketing lists, enabling you to efficiently manage and maintain your User lists by easily and inexpensively sending email promotions and messages to them.
This software allows your customers and or future prospects to:
sign up for your mailing list by using a form on your website, exactly like the one you can see to the right hand side of this paragraph in the top right hand column of this web page.
Confirming their request to be added to the list ( i.e. they "opt-in" to your list)
Unsuscribe from that list, at any time they wish, upon demand.
This software should also ensure that you are in total compliance with
Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing
("CAN-SPAM") ACT of 2003.
This is the U.S. law that regulates
commercial e-mail. It stands for “Controlling the Assault of
Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act of 2003.” Violation of these rules is subject to fines up to $11,000.
The goals of the Act are:
To reduce spam and unsolicited pornography by prohibiting senders of unsolicited commercial e-mail messages from disguising the source and content of their messages.
To give consumers the choice to cease receiving a sender’s unsolicited commercial e-mail messages.
The act requires email marketers to include the following in email messages:
The subject line must clearly communicate the content included in the body of the email.
Emails can not contain misleading “From” or “To” information. Domain
names, email addresses and routing information needs to be correct.
There must be a way for customers to “unsubscribe” or “opt-out” from
receiving messages. If a person opts-out the company has 10 days to
stop sending them messages. This unsubscribe option needs to be
available for at least 30 days after the email is sent.
All commercial emails must include a physical address.
Additional
provisions included with the CAN-SPAM Act force email marketers to
comply with the following or face criminal charges:
Email
addresses need to be legitimately obtained. Addresses can not be made up
by combining common names, letters or numbers. Commonly called a
“dictionary attack.”
Email messages can not be sent to
“harvested” email addresses. For example, addresses collected from
forums or chat rooms are considered harvested lists. A popular, yet
deceptive practice was to harvest email addresses then sell the list to
legitimate companies.
Emails can not be sent through a computer or network without permission.
Companies can not use scripting or other automated ways to register multiple email addresses.
Commercial emails can not be sent through another computer with out authorization of the owner.
Companies can not falsely represent themselves as owners of multiple IP addresses.