Why You Shouldn’t Say that You Comply with CAN-SPAM

One of the (many) things that we explain to people in our Email Deliverability Handbook is that while you must comply with CAN-SPAM, you shouldn’t say that you comply with CAN-SPAM.

This advice may seem counter-intuitive. However, here’s the deal:

Many spam filters actually consider saying in your mailings that you comply with CAN-SPAM to be a sign that your email is most likely spam.

Here’s one of the primary reasons for that:

Because while complying with CAN-SPAM is necessary - it is by no means sufficient - to best email practices.

In other word, conscientious mailers go far and above the requirements of CAN-SPAM. Oh, they are CAN-SPAM compliant, but they also are doing far more than just complying with CAN-SPAM in terms of their email sending practices.

And, it’s no coincidence that their email gets a much higher deliverability rate than the email of the mailers who just comply with CAN-SPAM, and do no more. Those people are often - in fact more often than not - sending email that most of the world in fact considers to be spam. Certainly their email is getting tagged as spam - and delivered to the junk folder or the inbox far more often.

Not only will saying in your email that you are CAN-SPAM compliant get you shunted to the junk folder, but it really is like wearing a nametag that says “Hi, my name is The Best Thing I Can Say About My Email is That it Complies with the Law that Doesn’t Keep Me from Spamming.”

Ironically, the email notifications for our own article yesterday - which dealt with CAN-SPAM - were living proof of this, in action, as at least one reader found that the email alert for yesterday’s CAN-SPAM article went to their junk folder. I’ll be that will be the case for this article, for some of you, too.

I guess we should follow our own advice, huh?

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