Here are several excerpts from a post to the Email Insider blog by David Baker, IAB Issues Email Data Management Best Practices:

The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) announced the release of "Email Data Management Best Practices" on Thursday. It's a document designed to improve the effectiveness of email marketing by providing standards and guidelines in privacy, data security, permission and deliverability.

Some of the key recommendations are:

• Senders should only send commercial email to individuals who have provided informed consent.
• For all third-party licensed data, a global unsubscribe mechanism should be implemented.
• Consumer permission to receive commercial email from a List Owner cannot be replicated or transferred without reference to the original point of collection.
• Clear, conspicuous and repeated notice of data collection and use are required.
• Advertisers and marketers should authenticate their email by publicly registering the domains from which they send email.
• Anyone using email for marketing purposes should adopt and use authentication protocols for both their email and corporate domains.
• All parties should use a one-way encrypted hash to encrypt suppression files.

To get a broader view of what drove these recommendations, David sat down with John Engler, vice president and general manager of Unsub Central, and a member of the IAB subcommittee that developed the standards. See the complete source article for a few comments from that interview.

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About the Author: Jim Berkowitz is a seasoned executive with more than 30 years of professional services and project management experience related to Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Financial Management (Accounting & ERP) software solutions for small, mid-sized and Fortune 500 companies. As a Sales Force Automation and CRM Consultant, Jim has assisted more then 100 companies with the design and implementation of custom CRM solutions.

Mr. Berkowitz is the founder and President of CRM Mastery, Inc.; a company dedicated to serving small and mid-sized enterprises (SMEs) by offering affordable tools and guidance to help them plan for and succeed with their CRM initiatives.