UK-Jive Mailing List Management Service

Promoting responsible e-mail distribution.

The EU Privacy and Electronic Communications Directive became law on October 31st 2004 and was backed up with UK legislation on December 11th 2004. This makes the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail (aka Spam) a criminal offence. You can now only send e-mail communications to customers, if you have their prior consent.

The main points of this legislation are:

• You must get prior consent from the individual before sending them e-mails
• You can continue to mail existing contacts / customers, but you must give them the opportunity to opt-out on every occasion. You must also only target them with similar products and services to their previous dealings with you.
• Consent means the customer must take a proactive action. In essense, this means they must either manually subscribe to your mailing list or tick a box when contacting you to be added to your list. (Note: If a box is pre-ticked, this is NOT a legal way of getting their consent to opt-in to communications - they must perform the action)

If your current mailing system doesn't offer opt-in and opt-out facilities, as well as being not legal, you're undoubtedly sending mail to people who don't want to receive it. Not only can this be annoying to the recipient, but it can be giving your business a bad name.

All commercial ISPs prohibit the sending of unsolicited bulk e-mail. If you're currently maintaining an e-mail list without the correct measures in place, your recipients can legitimately report you to your ISP as a spammer & you run the risk of having your account shut-down. (This really does happen!)

As well as the legal aspects of sending bulk e-mail, you also need to consider the logistics of distributing hundreds (and often thousands) of messages.

If you simply copy your distribution list into the 'BCC' field of your e-mail program, it's likely that many of your messages will be flagged as 'spam' by the recipient's system & never get read. Also, many e-mail providers place restrictions on the number of outgoing email messages you can send in a certain time period, such as an hour, a day or even a month. They do this primarily to minimise the chance that their e-mail service will be used to send out spam but the limits can sometimes catch you unawares.

If you maintain a sizeable mailing list, sign-up to our dedicated list management service which is designed to manage your mailings resposibly and legally.

• Double opt-in and opt-out facilities for adding and removing of e-mail addresses.
  The double opt-in/out mechanism not only confirms the address to be genuine but also ensures the owner of the e-mail account genuinely wants their address added or removed from the list.
• HTML and plain text e-mail delivery.
  Although HTML e-mail is now common, there are still many recipients who choose to receive their e-mail in plain text format. If you send complex HTML e-mail you should always supply a simplified text version, otherwise your message may be incorrectly formatted and difficult to read.
  This facility isn't available when sending through your standard e-mail client (i.e. Outlook) - You have to rely on its own conversion, which is often wrong.
• Send linked or embedded graphics.
  If your e-mail contains images, you have the option of linking or embedding them within your message. Linked images must be downloaded from a web server before they can be viewed - smaller e-mail but recipient may not see the image if they choose not to download the image. Embedded images are sent with the e-mail - larger e-mail, but recipient is more likely to see the image.
• Automatic e-mail distribution
  Compose your e-mail, preview it then click the 'send' button to broadcast the message to all your subscribers. Our mailing list server has been designed to send mailing list e-mail safely and legally.
• Automatic bounce handling
  Our system handles all e-mail bounces automatically. Every returned e-mail is inspected and if appropriate, the address is removed from the list.
• + many, many more features!
  Our e-mail server is designed to manage large mailing lists. All the tools you require to manage your list of subscribers are available in a easy to use web interface.

Read our Frequently Asked Questions...