Online businesses today use affiliate marketing to launch their products and services. The company doing the affiliate marketing will find leads and then pass on your business product and or service to that lead to try to turn it into a sale.

 

When it comes to online affiliate marketing, affiliates are not too controversial; however affiliates who advertise via email have become a major problem because they have a tendency to send spam mail. Spam mail is defined as Can Spam.

 

When you receive Can Spam it’s a pretty sure bet that the business responsible for the actions of their agents. Can Spam requirements are usually handled in the same way by affiliates as if they were sending their own mail and their headers must never be misleading and all must have a physical mailing address.

 

There is a rule for affiliate ads when it comes to opt outs and it requires that if a recipient chooses to opt out they are not to be sent any further ads.  Any time an affiliate receives an opt out notice they must go in and remove the addresses of those that have asked for them not to be mailed.

 

A lot of affiliate marketing companies are very undesirable with their business practices.  There is a cause of concern from businesses and affiliates that are reputable.  The undesirable affiliate marketing companies are taking the list of opt outs and then mailing to their clients information to those that have already opted out. Seems like a wasted effort but it is happening none the less.

 

There really is no realistic solution to all of this issue, however a some companies are using address that are one way scrambled which is simply just a scrambled version of your address it is also called Address Hash. So if a business provides a hash opt out list to an affiliate they can use it to clean their lists and they will know what addressed have gotten cancelled. There would still be a chance that those addresses will be played with by the undesirable affiliates but it’s a technique that may work.

 

In any case, when a business does a literal list, third party or hashes they will have to do something. It would be safe to say that if there is an affiliate email program happening that does not include opt out management techniques they are clearly not Can Spam Compliant and should not be trusted.