[kwlug-disc] KWLUG and CASL (and Mailman)

[Paul Nijjar]

My feeling is that the Canadian anti-spam legislation does not apply
to KWLUG mailing lists, but I do not know this for sure. 

Background: 
http://fightspam.gc.ca/eic/site/030.nsf/eng/home

Some thoughts: 

KWLUG has two mailing lists of note: kwlug-announce and kwlug-disc. 
The only commercial solicitations on these lists that I can think of
are: 

- People offering to sell things on kwlug-disc
- Information about the FLOSS Fund 

I believe that almost everybody on kwlug-announce has consented to
being on the list: 
- Many people signed up during our meetings
- Some people subscribed on their own
- A few people gave verbal consent to be on the list (and then we
  subscribed them)

The problem is that we do not have paperwork to explicitly track how
people got on the list. 

A similar situation exists for kwlug-disc, except that there are very
few people who were signed up during meetings. 

I do not think I should be too concerned about this, but maybe I
should be. KWLUG does not actually exist in the eyes of the
government; we are not registered as a nonprofit or a business or
anything else. So it is not clear who gets sued/arrested if some
proprietary software troublemaker raises a stink about getting KWLUG
emails. 

One oddity about the legislation is that organizations are supposed to
put snailmail addresses in their messages. We don't have a snailmail
address, so unless a member wants to handle this I do not know what to
do. 

I am thinking I should probably make mention of CASL in the next
kwlug-announce message, but I am not that enthusiastic about purging
the list and starting again. 

One of the confounding factors is that Mailman sucks for complying
with this legislation. As far as I know, it does not have good ways to
track when and how people are subscribed. Its unsubscribe
functionality also sucks. Thus people are going to proprietary
solutions like Mailchimp which rewrite all links in a message with
tracking information. 

Thoughts?

- Paul


--
http://pnijjar.freeshell.org