Bulk email marketing is the method of sending bulk emails to a massive database of email address owners as a mode of advertisement for products and services. This is a crucial selling tool for most online marketers today as it cuts the cost of advertising dramatically, possibly even making the online advertising budget zero. However, thinking along these lines is dangerous because there is another group of people who do the same thing called spammers. Spammers send bulk emails randomly to all the email addresses that they can get their hands on and in most cases, how they get these addresses is more than just a bit dubious. Spammers harvest email addresses by many means like scouring the internet for email addresses left in pages, hacking into desktops and sending entire address books back to the spammer, randomly mailing all possible combinations of addresses for a particular domain and even purchasing databases from other spammers. According to the latest legislation against the process of spamming, the US Government passed the CAN SPAM bill that controversially allowed spam to a certain extent but cracked down on its abuse.

CAN SPAM allows a bulk email marketing campaign to operate within certain guidelines.

The first guideline is that email addresses that are harvested from any purchased software is illegal. This simply means that you need to put some effort into getting a database of customers and not use a spammer's means. This also means that you need to flex your marketing muscle, tie-up with online entities that have existing subscribers, and then add them to your database.

The second is that when you send bulk emails to people, you must also include an opt-out option. This is only fair when you consider that you never were supposed to contact them in the first place. Besides, this will also narrow down your market to serious buyers for your products with no effort from your end.

The third guideline is that you have to be explicit in your intentions when sending bulk emails. This means that if you are dealing in adult material, you have to use certain tags in your subject line and try being as least offensive as possible lest a child is the recipient of the email. Ideally, if you acquired your database correctly, then this would not be a problem in the first place.

The fourth guideline deals with how you send mails in the bulk email campaign. This is what will separate you from a spammer. The law states that you cannot send bulk emails from an open relay server, to a harvested address, or one that contains a false header.

The fifth guideline is less of a CAN SPAM guideline and more of common sense, and this is that once a person opts-out or unsubscribes from the service, you do not mail that person again or sell that address further on for someone else to start sending bulk emails.

If you follow these guidelines, you should have no problems with your email campaigns.