Opt in email lists

Opt in lists are lists wherein people have said, yes please send me information by email.  All our lists are opt in.

In fact our lists are double opt in.  Because having said, "yes send me emails" we send them an email that then says, "are you really sure you want to receive emails.  If yes click reply".   

Legalities

The EU Directive on email marketing covers the email addresses that are the home addresses (i.e. not business) of individuals.   Business addressees are not covered by the directive.

However you need to be aware of the following:

• You have an obligation to remove someone from a list if they ask you to - and you must make it easy for them to do so.   So if you buy a list for one year's use and someone asks you to remove them after the first mail, you must do it.
  
  
• Incidentally, if you have a list of your own customers and you have asked them if they mind you sending them updates etc via email, and they have said yes, no problem, then you can email them for as long as you long - as long as you take them off the list if they ask for this.
  
  
• The benefit of the double opt in system is that if the opt in box was originally ticked by mistake - or maliciously by someone else - the person who receives the emails can still stop them, by failing to response to the second opt in. This makes double opt in lists far more responsive in terms of readership than single opt in lists.
  
  
• But if you want to pass addresses on to others you should be asking this as a separate question - the one where the company says it will pass your name on to "carefully selected and relevant companies".  Only where they say yes can you do this with impunity. Now you might argue that the two points here overlap - if they are business mailing lists you can mail them anyway - so why worry about them being customers and having given their ok or not. The fact is that you don't know if your customers are giving you their home address or their business address.   The reality is that the address Trixie@hamilton-house.com is a business address (or it would be if we had a Trixie working for us - as it is we don't so the mail won't get through - I just put this in to annoy those people who collect email addresses out of websites.   But some years ago I had TonyAttwood@themail.co.uk and used it as my home email address.  Supposing I happened to order from you, but use my home address because I was working at home that day?   Email me there, without my permission and I could get angry - and I would have all the legal backing in the world that I wanted.   There has been at least one court case on this, and the company that did the emailing ultimately settled out of court and paid out several hundred pounds.   The fact is that since district judges in county courts probably get as much junk as you or I they are going to be hard to convince that "it was an honest mistake guv".