Simplenews Canada Antispam

Implements measures to comply with recent Canada law requiring explicit opt-in for all commercial messaging.

Disclaimers

1. I am not a lawyer, and cannot claim that this module is a complete or sufficient solution to the legal requirements governing commercial electronic messages.
2. This was developed to suit the needs of a client, and might be idiosycratic. I strongly suggest testing this module in a dev environment to ensure it suits your needs before running it on your real mailing lists.

What this module does

The new law requires a detailed audit trail of explicit consent to recieve electronic messages. Consent must be positive (ie, opt-in) and must be accompanied with a description of the purpose of the communications, offline contact information, assurance that unsubscription is possible, and a link / mechanism to unsubscribe.

This usually means that organizations/companies need to remove everyone from their mailing lists and then get them to re-confirm their consent with the appropriate elements required by law. This module provides a mechanism for this removal, adds detailed logging of subscriptions and confirmations, and optionally forces double-opt-in even for admin additions of new subscribers.

When enabled, configured, and turned on, this module will:

Elicit confirmation
- in cron batches, mark all active subscribers as inactive and send them a customizable email asking them to confirm
- upon confirmation, re-enable their subscription
- logs deactivation and reactivation
- optionally, will provide an Ubercart discount code as an incentive to confirm

Log un/subscribe activity
- log admin- and user-initiated subscription status changes
- logs time and IP address for confirmations

Force double-opt-in
- optionally, will send a confirmation email to subscribers added by admins

In order to maintain compliance with the law, simplenews should be set to require double opt-in for anonymous subscribers.

Thanks to Venus Envy for funding the development of this module.

I am available for contract consulting on this module, Simplenews, and generally anything Drupal.