PIPEDA is a Canadian law relating to data privacy. It governs how private-sector organizations collect, use and disclose personal information in the course of commercial business.  This law requires organizations to:

- obtain consent when they collect, use or disclose their personal information

- supply an individual with a product or a service even if they refuse consent for the collection, use or disclosure of your personal information unless that information is essential to the transaction

- collect information by fair and lawful means; and

- have personal information policies that are clear, understandable and readily available.

Canada’s Electronic Commerce Protection Act (ECPA) is essentially the same as CAN-SPAM with its 5 requirements noted above, but with one exception: ECPA requires explicit consent to send commercial email to your database, whereas CAN-SPAM does not.

Purge Dead Emails – one of the biggest ways receiving mail servers identify spammers is by the number of dead email addresses in their list.  Spammers typically buy or harvest lists and a large percentage of these emails are dead.  So if more than 10% of your database is dead email addresses then you may find your emails getting blocked on a large scale, meaning they won’t even reach your recipients’ spam folders, much less their inbox.  Email service providers make it easy for you to purge dead emails from your list.  Each campaign you send will generate a list of dead email addresses within 48 hours.

The best way of purging these emails from your database is using the software program Quicklist.  This program allows you to compare one list of email addresses to another.  With Quicklist you can combine two lists into one with the Merge function, find emails common to two lists with the Intersect function, and remove duplicates with the Dedupe function.  Load your prospect database into the first window at the far left (Source A) and then load your list of unsubscribes and bounced emails into the middle window (Source B).  Then select the Dedupe A-B function.  This will remove all of the unsubsribes and bounces from your prospect list.

Another very useful program is called Email Address Collector.  This program allows you to quickly gather email addresses from anywhere on your computer, whether it be in Outlook or from various folders on your PC.  This program goes hand in hand with Quicklist and is essential to have.