Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation will comes into effect on July 1, 2014. The spirit of this law is promote a safer online environment and to protect Canadians from scams and disruptive/unwanted emails. We are all for that!
The Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has outlined 3 rules that must be followed when sending out a commercial electronic message (CEM).
- Prior consent from recipient.
- Clear identification of sender.
- A mechanism to unsubscribe in the future.
To be clear, we do not send out spam. We also do not "harvest" or purchase email addresses.
However, we do send out the following unsolicited messages to an email list:
- Monthly ikebana lesson schedule updates.
- Occasional announcements of origami and other workshops that we plan to have.
These messages can be technically categorized as CEM and therefore subject to the Anti-Spam Law. The email addresses in our mailing lists have been painstakingly collected through the years from people with whom we have had direct contact. They have expressed interest in our activities. It is unfortunate that we did not keep any kind of proof of consent. Some email addresses were given to us by phone, by little slips of memo paper, by a business card, etc. None were archived in any organized way.
Sooooo, we're going to push the re-set button. We will delete our mailing lists and start with a clean slate.
Our Request
If you would like to continue (or begin) receiving our ikebana lesson schedule updates and/or our origami & other workshop announcements, please send us an email saying:
I subscribe to your ikebana / origami & other workshops [choose one or both] mailing list.
In the same way, you will be able to un-subscribe by sending us another email to tell us to remove you from the mailing list(s)....and we will do so promptly (as we have always done till now).
Thank you very much for your understanding.