If you don’t keep up with the email industry news, I can’t blame you. It’s pretty boring stuff most days. However, I am happy to say that there has been a big hubbub in the email world due to the announcement that CASL has been signed into Canadian Law.

The Canadian Minister of Industry, James Moore, has announced that the long-time-coming anti-spam legislation will be put into effect as of July 1st, 2014. This leaves email marketers a little over 6 months in order to review the changes, and ensure compliance on their part to the law.

Unlike the CAN-SPAM Act, the CASL law specifically prohibits sending unsolicited email except for a few select circumstances. Per the new law, all commercial emails are required to obtain opt-in permission from their recipients before sending any commercial/bulk email.

Even more specifically, the CASL Law has laid down a pretty clear-cut definition for what is considered to be “Opt-In”. This has been a major flaw with the CAN-SPAM Act as the definition of “Opt-In” was implied, rather than specified. This makes the CASL Law the most inclusive and most powerful anti-spam law to date.

Myself, and the rest of Benchmark Email are very excited for these changes. As members of the anti-spam community, we are always happy to see new standards set that can help reduce the spam footprint on inboxes. Our only disappointment is that this law is specific to Canada. If it were our choice, the law would be global.

For now, our team is still dissecting the documentation of the law to get each detail. From what we have seen so far there are no major changes that will impact Benchmark Email’s service, since our service has always been permission based. We will have a more detailed blog post on this later, once all of the details have been hammered out.