If you send out mass marketing email to recipients who did not request to receive your emails or did not give their prior consent to be subscribed to your mailing list, you are spamming those recipients. Whether you offer an unsubscribe option in the email or not does not matter. Sending out bulk unsolicited email is the sending out spam. Users will often not click on any unsubscribe links in unsolicited emails because for all they know, clicking on the link provided in an unsolicited email may simply lead them to download malware or a virus or subscribe their email address to even more spam lists. So providing an unsubscribe link in your unsolicited email does not stop the email from being spam.
The Australian government has strict laws regarding the sending out of spam. To ensure you don’t accidentally send out any spam, we encounrage your to educate yourself regarding the rules and regulations surrounding the Spam Act 2003 by reading through the articles provided at the below website.
A few key points to remember
- The recipient may give express consent, or under certain circumstances, consent may be inferred from their conduct, or an existing business or other relationships.
- The message must contain accurate information about the person or organisation that authorised the sending of the message and how to contact them.
- The message must contain a functional ‘unsubscribe’ facility to allow the recipient to opt out from receiving messages from that source in the future. Unsubscribe requests must be honoured within five working days.
Another key point to remember is your subscribers will often stop using or delete their email accounts. You are required to keep your mailing list up to date and to remove non-existent email addresses from your mailing lists. If you do not do this, our anti-spam system may prevent you from sending out emails due to your account reaching it’s max defers per hour limit.
