Washington Email Marketing Climate Has Changed!

Last week, the Washington State Supreme Court issued a ruling which is anticipated to have significant implications for going-forward compliance with the Washington email law, the Commercial Electronic Mail Act ("CEMA").

What are the compliance obligations under the Washington email marketing law?

As long-time readers of this blog know, state and federal email statutes generally regulate the kinds of representations that can be made in an email's subject and from lines. The Washington Supreme Court was recently tasked with determining the scope of CEMA's subject line regulation, which states, in pertinent part, that "[n]o person may initiate . . . a commercial electronic mail message . . . [to] a Washington resident that . . . [c]ontains false or misleading information in the subject line." Specifically, the Court sought to clarify whether this restriction prohibits false or misleading information about the commercial nature of an email message (i.e., what the