In many cases, deciding whether your client's subscriber lists meet our permission guidelines is pretty straightforward - perhaps it is a list of customers or people who filled in a subscribe form.

There are some other cases which are less clear cut, and that we get asked about a lot. The most common area of misconception is with membership lists. Typically, this includes things like Chamber of Commerce members, Real Estate Association members and conference attendee lists.

Often such lists are openly shared with the members and sponsors of such organisations, even with the explicit understanding that they will be used by members to contact each other.

However, we don't allow you or your clients to send to such lists with MailBuild (or Campaign Monitor). Even though often this usage is allowed by the Association or organisation, the key difference is the other members have not given their explicit permission to you directly.

They have given their permission to the group they joined, or the conference they attended, but not directly to you or your client. So while in some cases people will be happy to hear from you, others will not, and we've seen many complaints from such lists in the past.

That's why we can't allow sending to membership lists, unless your client is the actual organisation itself. Of course, if you have contacted individual members and obtained their permission, that's totally fine.

Maintaining a higher level of permission even than the organisation that owns the list helps us to protect our whitelisted status, and ensure we can keep delivering email for all of our customers.

We always appreciate your help in explaining these policies to your clients. Don't forget about our permission guideline handouts that you can download to give to your clients, to help them understand.