SEATTLE–The Council for Responsible E-Mail, part of the Association for Interactive Media, announced yesterday at the DMA's net.marketing conference here that it has passed six resolutions.
The resolutions represent a first step toward resolving some of the contentious issues AIM has faced since being acquired by the DMA, in that it contains language on which various AIM factions have agreed. For example, the group for the first time has agreed on definitions of “harvest” and “prior business or personal relationship.”
“Everyone came to the table with pet issues, but knowing we had to take a first step,” said Ben Isaacson, AIM's executive director. “We had to get these issues off the table so we could get to the nitty gritty.”
Under the resolutions, the CRE — which represents about 50 companies — agreed that:
* Marketers must not falsify the sender's domain name or use a non-responsive IP address without implied permission from the recipient or transferred permission from the marketer.
* Marketers must not purposely falsify the content of the subject line or mislead readers from the content of the e-mail message.
* All bulk e-mail marketing messages must include an option for the recipient to unsubscribe (be removed from the list) from receiving future messages from that sender, list owner or list manager.
* Marketers must inform the respondent oat the time of online collection of the e-mail addresses for what marketing purposes the respondent's e-mail address will be used.
* Marketers must not harvest e-mail addresses with the intent to send bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail without consumers' knowledge or consent. (Harvest is defined as compiling or stealing e-mail addresses through anonymous collection procedures such as via a Web spider, through chat rooms or other publicly displayed areas listing personal or business e-mail addresses.
* It opposes sending bulk unsolicited commercial e-mail to an e-mail address without a prior business or personal relationship. (Business or personal relationship is defined as any previous recipient-initiated correspondence, transaction activity, customer service activity, third-party permission use or proven offline contact.
