As of July 1, Canada’s Anti Spam Legislation (or CASL) comes into effect. Basically, if you are running some kind of email list through MailChimp, Constant Contact or iContact, you need express permission from the people who are on that list in order to continue to send them emails.
Here’s an article I wrote about this a while back: New Email Spam Regulations: What You Need to Know.
Constant Contact has an excellent CASL checklist that you can download and go through to make sure your list is compliant.
What many people are doing are sending an email out to their lists asking them to confirm they want to be on the list. If you do not confirm, you’ll be deleted from the list.
If you want to follow suit, here are a couple of excellent examples, that explain the situation and then create a really clear call to action:
One question I’ve been getting a lot is, “if I have an email subscription option for my blog, do I need to send these out?” As far as I can tell, from the research I’ve done, and conversations I’ve had online with people in the know, the answer is no. As long as you have express consent from people to be on your list (they have to give you their email address and give consent when they subscribe to your blog’s RSS), and they are able to unsubscribe at any time, you should be fine.
Additional resources:
Feedblitz is a great resource, including: CASL: The New Canadian Anti-Spam Regulation
The rules for NFPs or Charities are slightly different. Read: 9 Things NonProfits Need to Know about CASL