Tag Archives: law

Satisfaction Surveys in Transactional Emails From a German Legal Perspective

When it comes to the legal basis for sending emails, many marketers differentiate between two types of messages:

  1. commercial emails, which advertise or promote a commercial product, service, or content – e.g. a newsletter.
  2. transactional emails, which facilitate an agreed-upon transaction or update a customer about an ongoing transaction – e.g. an electronic receipt.

The first one, so the thought goes, needs a prior consent, the second one does not. Continue reading

Re-permissioning ideas for GDPR compliance

77 days to go before the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) comes into force. Advertisers all over the world will need to make adjustments to their data processing strategies when targeting Europeans. This also applies to many email senders, from whom I therefore expect re-permissioning campaigns. Continue reading

German email legislation: opt-in expiration & multichannel opt-ins

The German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof aka BGH) published a ruling, which is interesting in two ways. First, it says a consent usually does not expire over time. And secondly, it is possible for marketers to obtain consent for several channels with only a single checkbox. In the light of the strict jurisdiction, this may come as a surprise to some. Continue reading

Welcome to Absurdistan: Did a higher Regional Court just kill double opt-in in Germany?

There is the catastrophe: double opt-in legally inadmissible” (Dr. Schirmbacher), “one of the most serious und fatal failures of justice in the last 5 years” (Dr. Bahr). Those are just two out of many comments. In fact, I haven’t seen any positive ones among experts until now. And I don’t think there will be any.

What happened? Continue reading

Thunderbird wants email advertisers to honor ‘Do Not Track’

After announcing to no longer focus on innovations for their email client, Mozilla now released Thunderbird 15. The last major one comes with a new privacy feature that could possibly have a huge impact on the email industry: Do Not Track for email. That means, the user shall be empowered to opt-out of tracking his user behavior (opens, clicks, …) by ticking a checkbox ‘Tell web sites I do not want to be tracked’ in the ‘Security > Web Content’ menu. Continue reading

Double opt-in in Germany – is it legally mandated?

I noticed some buzz around the German opt-in legislation lately, or more precisely: concerning the use of double opt-in. (See for example the “Drowning in data” panel recording from the last Email Insider Summit at 38:11, or this tweet.) So… is double opt-in, where subscribers have to activate their subscription by clicking a confirmation link, required in Germany? Here are the most important things for you to know: Continue reading