In addition to checking online communication rules in your industry, you should look at organizations dedicated to fighting villains such as malware, spam, and viruses and to creating better online communication. The Messaging, Malware and Mobile Anti-Abuse Working Group is one such organization, but because that’s a mouthful, the group also goes by the abbreviation M3AAWG, which is only slightly easier to remember, let alone say. Fortunately, after you type www.m3aawg.org (see Figure 2-4) into the address bar, you can bookmark the page and forget the URL.
You know that the M3AAWG is a serious effort when you look at its list of sponsors, which includes Adobe, AT&T, Comcast, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Microsoft. And the list of full members is equally impressive: It includes Apple, Cisco Systems, IBM, and Twitter.
The site includes a list of best practices as well as other tips for sending proper messages, and you don’t even have to sign up to be a member — they’re free to view directly from the M3AAWG website.
FIGURE 2-4: The M3AAWG website includes links to best practices.
If you suspect that your email messages are being blocked by the intended recipient or you can’t receive email from a specific person, a good place to find out whether that's the case is the Spamhaus Project website at www.spamhaus.org (see Figure 2-5).
The Spamhaus Project is a global organization based in Andorra, a small European country that’s easy to forget (and we won’t judge you). It’s tucked away in the Pyrenees Mountains on the French/Spanish border. The word spamhaus is a made-up German expression, coined by founder Steve Linford to refer to an Internet service provider that spams or provides services to spammers.
Like M3AAWG, The Spamhaus Project has a lot of big sponsors, including Amazon Web Services, 1&1, and Rackspace. It provides a lot of free services, including the ability for you to see whether a domain name or even a specific IP address is on one of its blocklists. If you continue to receive spam, you can also see whether the sender is on the Spamhaus Project Register of Known Spam Operators database.
FIGURE 2-5: The Spamhaus Project website has links to various online resources to help you identify spammers.
Adhering to country and regional laws
If you live outside the United States, you likely have policies in your country (and perhaps your region) that will apply to your online marketing operations. This section covers the legislation in North America and Europe (and chances are that these laws have influenced online marketing laws where you live).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_spam:legislation_by_country. From there, you should be able to find the legislation that applies to your country.
The European Union
You may have heard a lot about the General Data Protection Regulation, better known by its abbreviation, GDPR. The GDPR is a regulation touted by the GDPR website at https://gdpr.eu (see Figure 2-6) as being the toughest privacy-and-security law in the world.
FIGURE 2-6: The GDPR has a comprehensive website to answer your questions.
Like similar laws in the US, the GDPR lays out seven principles for protecting data:
Your processes must be lawful, fair, and transparent.
You must process data for legitimate purposes directly related to the subject of that data.
You should collect and process only as much data as you need for your purposes and not one bit more.
You must keep personal data accurate and updated.
You should store personally identifiable data only as long as you need for your specified purpose.Any data processing you carry out must ensure security, integrity, and confidentiality, such as by using strong encryption.
The person responsible for managing the data — the data controller, in GDPR terminology — must be able to demonstrate GDPR compliance.
What we list here only scratches the surface. You can view the latest news about GDPR and get all your questions answered (and then some) on the GDPR website at https://gdpr.eu.
The United Kingdom
Brexit may be a reality, but data protection knows no borders, and so it’s no surprise that UK laws are modeled closely on the GDPR. The people who put together the UK policy decided to make things easy and just refer to their policy as UK GDPR.
The Information Commissioner’s Office, or ICO, is an independent body that contains information about the UK GDPR for businesses and individuals. For businesses, that means you can't just learn what the UK GDPR requires; you also need to take a self-assessment test to see whether your business is ready to adhere to the UK GDPR — no matter whether you’re in the UK or you want to do business in the UK.
For consumers, this means you can learn what your rights are under the UK GDPR, including your rights to be informed, to get your data deleted, to limit how organizations use your data, and more.
All this information, as well as a complaint form, is available on the ICO at https://ico.org.uk, as shown in Figure 2-7.
FIGURE 2-7: The Information Commissioner’s Office website offers news, advice,