Did you know that as Realtors you fall under the federal CAN/SPAM guidelines?  Let’s look at what the FTC says:

Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.

So it’s pretty clear that we too must comply with this regulation – the good news is that for you, the HOME or Woods agents – this isn’t too tough.  We have most of it covered already, but to ensure we are OK, I want to focus today on a simple “blurb” that we can add to our email signatures in order to ensure compliance on that front:

If you consider this message a solicitation and prefer not to receive future messages from this sender, click ‘reply’ and add the text ‘remove’ to the subject line.  The information contained in this email is privileged and confidential information intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above.  If you are not the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited.  If you have received this communication in error, please immediately notify the sender via return email and permanently delete the original message from your system. Thank you.

UPDATE (2:30pm): It’s come to my attention that there’s another key component that needs to be added to your signature, and that is both your company name and the physical address of your office.  As an example, mine now reads:

Ben Dinger
HomeServices of Nebraska
3355 Orwell St, Lincoln NE, 68516
(my email address, phone, web links, and opt-out paragraph all fall below this)

To add this to all your outgoing messages, in webmail, it’s pretty easy.  Just click this button at the top right:

Then copy and paste the above into the “Email Signature” area halfway down the page, and check the “Automatically include my signature on outgoing messages” box below the signature box:

There you go, now you’re covered on Webmail.  Now we have the “tricky” part, how about on your BlackBerry?  Do you need to have it there?  The short answer is: yes, if you send email you definitely do.  The good news is that yes, you can have your Blackberry append an auto-signature to all of your emails, and setting it up is pretty easy.  First, when in your messages, hit the Menu key (which I like to call the BlackBerry key – what my finger is pointing at):

Next, select the “Email Settings” option:

Finally, set “use auto signature” to “Yes”, and.. well.. let the typing begin..

There you go!  You can add an auto signature to pretty much any smart phone currently on the market, if you can’t find the options on yours send an email to the helpdesk by clicking here and we’ll help you find the option on your phone.   If you have any questions about the CAN-SPAM act, shoot them my way!

Quick Tip of the day: I used to take a few pictures, and after getting a new camera I now take a LOT of pictures.  After losing two hard drives on two computers at home recently (thankfully the backup drive waited to fail until AFTER I had restored the drive that backed up to it), I began worrying about “what if” in regards to all the pictures of the kids.  It seems the folks at Google have a great option for online storage that works seamlessly with my favorite free photo editor, Picasa.  Picasa Web Albums gives you 1GB of online storage for free, which is awesome, but if you’re like me – you have many more pictures than that.  Google has you covered, for $5 per year you get 20 gigabytes of online storage that you can seamlessly “sync” your Picasa albums to.

What’s even better about this?  If you use Gmail and Google Docs  – which I use both of extensively for personal things – that 20 GB extends to them as well.  I’ll have a longer blog post on this subject in the future, but for now – download Picasa and have fun!