It amazes me how many times I check my email, professional and personal, and see the amount of “junk” mail that is there, especially with all the big hype when CASL came into force July 1, 2014. Sure, I ordered off your website ONCE, does that mean I need to get your emails every three hours with your deals.
If you are like me, you just keep going in and deleting your junk folder. In the process of doing that, you may or may not be deleting items that were marked junk, but not really junk (I may have done that a time or two). Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation (“CASL”) was created so we don’t have to live in fear of our emails.
You have the right to not receive these emails if you don’t want to. All you have to do is click the “unsubscribe” link, which is usually contained near the bottom of an email somewhere and not that easy to find. If you unsubscribe, then in a perfect world you will no longer receive these emails. Our firm’s CASL unsubscribe is found clearly at the bottom of every email that is sent out from our firm.
What if you do receive more emails after unsubscribing? That’s why we have CASL. There is process in order to report. The Government of Canada has a website “fightspam.gc.ca” which will give you the tools you need in order to report the spam. This may surprise you (not) – they receive about 5,000 complaints per week. PER WEEK. That is a lot of spam.
The government is trying to impose fines to ensure compliance and there are decisions reported where the Commission imposed monetary fines. An individual was fined $15,000 for 10 violations, and a company was fined $50,000 for nine violations. If you are a company, how is your CASL unsubscribe managed? The last thing you want is a violation and having to pay a fine for non-compliance.
I think I’m going to go into my email and unsubscribe to keep my email clean (I didn’t know I shopped on-line that much) and to start this year out right with email management, what about you?
Christine Allan, Law Clerk