Advertising by email in Canada starts with consent

You have a list of customer emails and a promotion you want to send out. The temptation is to paste everyone into the BCC field of Gmail and hit send. Don't. In Canada, a commercial email is regulated by CASL — Canada's Anti-Spam Legislation — and "I bought a list" or "they're my customers" are not automatically a defence. Here is how to do it so the campaign helps you instead of generating complaints.

Consent is the part everyone skips

CASL says you generally need consent before sending a commercial electronic message to an address. Consent comes in two flavours:

• Express consent — the person actively opted in: ticked a box, typed their email into a signup form, said yes at the counter. This is the clean kind and it doesn't expire on its own.
• Implied consent — you have an existing business relationship, for example someone who bought from you recently. This kind is time-limited (commonly a couple of years from the purchase for a sale), so it runs out if you never get express consent.

Three things every message must carry

Even with consent, each message has to be identifiable and easy to leave. Put these in your template once and you never think about them again:

• Your business name and a way to reach you — a mailing address and either a phone number, email, or web address.
• A working unsubscribe mechanism that's obvious and easy to use.
• Unsubscribes honoured promptly — the law gives you a short window, so process them fast. Any decent email tool does this automatically.

An email platform handles the unsubscribe plumbing for you — that's the main reason to use one instead of Gmail.

Set it up this afternoon

Use an email service provider (ESP) rather than your personal inbox. Common ones are Mailchimp, MailerLite, and Brevo; most have a free tier for small lists — check the current pricing in CAD on each vendor's own page, since plans change. Then:

1. Create an account and add your business name and mailing address in the sender/footer settings. The ESP uses these to build the required footer automatically.
2. Import only the contacts you genuinely have consent for. Don't dump your entire phone contacts list in — import the people who actually opted in or bought from you.
3. Build a simple signup form and put it on your website and anywhere you take enquiries. This is how you turn implied consent into express consent and keep the list growing legally.
4. Authenticate your sending domain. The ESP will ask you to add SPF and DKIM DNS records at your domain registrar — follow their exact copy-paste instructions. This stops your promo landing in spam.
5. Send yourself a test. Confirm the footer shows your business name and address and that the unsubscribe link actually works.
6. Send to a small batch first, watch the bounce and complaint numbers in the ESP dashboard, then send to the rest.

Where DIY stops

Setup is genuinely a one-afternoon job. Where it gets murky is proving consent for an old list you inherited, or working out whether implied consent has expired. If your list is large, bought, or you're unsure where the addresses came from, that's a question for someone who knows CASL — the penalties for getting it wrong are real, and the Canadian regulator (the CRTC) publishes the current rules and penalty ranges on its CASL pages. Read those before a big send rather than guessing.