If you use email marketing to market your business, you know you are required to comply with the CAN-SPAM law or risk being labeled a spammer and fined up to $11,000 per violation - ouch! And if you were not aware of this, you need to educate yourself right away.
One of the requirements is that you must include your valid physical postal address in all of the email you send out. So what do you do if you work out of your home and you don't want to share your home address with the world? Well, it means you have to rent a mailbox.
P.O. boxes are cheap, but do they really constitute a physical postal address? Up until recently, I had understood they did not. That was until I participated in a recent discussion on Aweber's blog. Aweber is in the email marketing business, and is the company I use to manage all of my email marketing.
It turns out the CAN-SPAM law, like many other laws, is somewhat open to interpretation. Several bloggers questioned whether a P.O. Box was a physical postal address and shared that they had been advised it was not. So these folks had done as I have done - they had chosen to get a mailbox at the UPS Store, featuring a true physical postal address.
In the end, the answer to the question was never truly resolved, with the advice being, if you are at all uncertain, check with your attorney.
Well, I'm not sure what your attorney would charge to advise you on this, but at about $160 per year, a UPS Store mailbox is a great solution. It also makes it easy to receive shipments because someone is always there to receive them.
If you'd like to read a discussion about this topic on Aweber's blog, you can do so here.
Have you dealt with this issue in your own business? If so, I'd love to hear how you handled it. Post a comment and share!