Canada’s Anti-Spam legislation (CASL) came into effect on July 1, 2014. Among other things, this legislation is designed to reduce the amount of unsolicited commercial email received by Canadians.
The legislation’s definition of “commercial” includes any email that encourages an individual to participate in commercial activity, regardless of whether there is an expectation of profit. The broadness of the definition means that messages we might not normally consider commercial could still be subject to CASL, such as those that promote courses, programs, events or simply the image of the University.
If you have any doubts as to whether your messages might be considered commercial, it is prudent to err on the side of caution and comply with the legislation.
In most cases, compliance in the short term will not be difficult and may already be part of your email practices.
When sending emails you must
The main and potentially most confusing element of the legislation relates to consent. After July 1, you can send messages only to people who have given you express or implied consent. It is very likely you already have one or the other.
Express consent means the recipient specifically agreed to receive email from you through a clearly worded and explicit online or printed subscription form. Express consent does not expire and there are no problems continuing to send email to these people as long as you follow the stipulations described in the “Requirements” section.
Implied consent means you came into the possession of their email address under less specific circumstances through a pre-existing relationship like a membership in your organization, or because they volunteered for you, or voluntarily provided you with their email in some other way. This kind of consent expires within three years for addresses you had before July 1, 2014, and after two years for addresses you collect after July 1. It’s important to note that at any time during the interim period you can ask for and receive express consent, which would usually be achieved through an online form. That consent is permanent unless the recipient revokes it. If you don’t receive express consent in that time, you must stop sending messages to the recipient.
Going forward, it’s also important to keep records of how you received consent.
Read Section 6, the part of the legislation that deals with consent.
Regardless of the type of consent you have, the legislation requires (as of July 1) that senders provide recipients with an opportunity to revoke consent such as an “unsubscribe” link. If you are using an email tool without this functionality built in (such as Microsoft Outlook), you can comply with the legislation with an instruction such as:
“If you no longer wish to receive this email newsletter, please respond with the word UNSUBSCRIBE” in the subject line.”
You must then manually remove those people from your list.
Every message must also provide contact information including the sender’s name, the organization, a postal address, a physical address an email address and/or a phone number:
“This message was sent by John Q. Smith, Department of XXXXXXX, 923 Robie Street, Saint Mary’s University, Halifax, NS, B3H 3C3, johnq.smith@smu.ca, (902) 555-5555.”
For more information on CASL, visit the government's Fight Spam site.
If you have questions about how to comply with the legislation at Saint Mary's, please contact digital@smu.ca.
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