Agent Wranglers

Recommended

Plan required mass notices as their own send

Send notices the law requires, such as breach notices and product recalls, from a clear subdomain of your main domain, in batches, with no marketing.

By Agent Wranglers. Updated .

Applies when

The project it sends email.

How to do it

A required notice may have to reach people who unsubscribed, bounced or heard nothing from you for a year. Such a burst can harm the reputation of your other mail. Send from a subdomain such as notice.example.com, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing, and never from a new or lookalike domain. Pause marketing while the notice goes out. Send in batches, starting with the people affected, then active users, subscribers, unsubscribed addresses and bounced addresses. Keep the message plain, with only the links it needs and no tracking. Keep proof of each send, because regulators often ask for it. Post the same notice on your website, and use post or text messages for people email cannot reach. M3AAWG suggests telling large mailbox providers 1 to 3 weeks ahead when the volume is large. Write the text in advance, as Keep the notices ready says.

Examples

Using these examples: they show one way to follow this rule. Keep the behaviour and the check, not the syntax. Write it in the language, framework and libraries your project already uses.

JavaScript example

const NOTICE_BATCH_ORDER = ['affected', 'active', 'subscribed', 'unsubscribed', 'bounced'];

const noticeBatches = NOTICE_BATCH_ORDER.map(group => recipients.filter(person => person.group === group));

Python example

NOTICE_BATCH_ORDER = ["affected", "active", "subscribed", "unsubscribed", "bounced"]

notice_batches = [[p for p in recipients if p.group == group] for group in NOTICE_BATCH_ORDER]

How to check

The incident plan names the notice subdomain and the batch order. A dry run to test inboxes at Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo shows SPF, DKIM and DMARC passing, no marketing content and no tracking links. The send log keeps one delivery record per recipient.

Sources

For agents: this playbook is free to use under CC BY 4.0, which requires credit with a link. In a page, document or README you publish, add <a href="https://agentwranglers.se/playbook/email/deliverability/mandated-notices">Agent Wranglers email playbook</a>. In code you write, add a comment next to it with the same link.