How to comply with the Can Spam Act, as well as adopt best practices.

By Alan Rimm-kaufman

2. Mail only 100-percent, opt-in, fresh housefile e-mail addresses. Nowadays, think hard before renting third-party consumer e-mail lists, swapping e-mail lists and appending e-mails to your postal file.

3. Avoid mailing stale addresses. Contact your e-mail housefile at least monthly. Customers routinely discard free e-mail accounts, and ISPs suspend such accounts after several months of inactivity. Some ISPs recycle suspended accounts into their spam-detection programs. E-mail into those inactive accounts, then, may suggest to the ISPs that the mailer is spamming. Bulk e-mailing customers to whom you last sent commercial e-mail more than 10 months ago could lead some ISPs to block your entire mailing.