£80,000 fine issued for misusing newsletters

Price comparison website Moneysupermarket has been fined £80,000 by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for sending millions of emails to customers who had made it clear they didn’t want to be contacted in that way.

Read the news article

Some guidelines for your bulk email are

1. Frequent list management

  • Monitor bounces etc, ensure your list is clean.
  • Honor an opt-in method of subscription for your mailing list.
  • Ensure unsubscribe link for each email sent.
  • Reconfirm inactive subscribers and ideally remove them, as sending emails to users who don’t read them or mark them as spam will hurt your reputation and delivery metrics

2. Review Spam content on your email.

  • Ensure the links are correct and they point to domains and not IPs
  • Use standard ports
  • Ideally don’t use HTML forms, javascript or embedded objects
  • Test your email against a spam checker like
    http://www.sendblaster.com/en/mailing-spam-check-rate

3. Separate your emails via IP/Domain/From

  • Your business transactional email and your newsletter, promotional emails need to have different from address, and should come from different IPs. This ensures that if your newsletter emails get impacted (chances are higher than the transaction emails) then your business requirement emails don’t get affected.