[LRUG] Outsourcing Bulk Emailing

[Paul Robinson]

On 21 Oct 2011, at 09:47, Christian Batchelor wrote:

> My client says that because of data protection legislation in the UK we have to use a UK provider. Has anyone come across this limitation? 


Data Protection law states that you must either:

a) Keep all personal data in a jurisdiction with European Economic Area-equivalent data protection laws (i.e. within the EEA)

OR

b) Inform the subject that their data will be moved to a jurisdiction that has less adequate protection before moving it.

It isn't correct to say you must stay within the UK, but you must stay within the EU unless you want to email your subscribers and give them the option of opting out before moving it to the US.

More information:

http://www.ico.gov.uk/for_organisations/data_protection/the_guide/principle_8.aspx

It genuinely horrifies me that so many professional developers are not *very intimately* aware of the ins and outs of data protection legislation. If there was one piece of legislation we should know inside out it's probably the Data Protection Act: so, go familiarise yourself with it. The only reason it's not something most developer think about daily is because the ICO is so over-worked, we're unlikely to ever get prosecuted unless we screw up *really* badly.


> If you have been forced to UK providers, who are you using and how easy is to integrate with them using Rails?


Brightbox has a cloud solution that you could use to burst up to 2-3 small instances once a day, and then scale as appropriate. That to me seems to be an easy win given where you are right now. I have used Sendgrid and Mailchimp and they're good, expensive (for what they do) and both inappropriate for you, it would seem!


> They are suggesting silverpop.com which looks terribly corporate to me.



More importantly it also seems to be based in the US and so does not address the problem you have!

Good luck finding a solution,

Paul
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