Jimmy KimCEO & Founder, Commerce Roundtable · Marketer of 17+ Years, 4x Founder. Former DTC/Retailer & SaaS Founder. Newsletter. Host of ASOM & Send it! Podcast. DTC Event: Commerce Roundtable

Don't do this with your email subject lines

13 Mar 2025 · 1 min

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0:33

In this brief segment, the speaker warns against using misleading email subject lines such as adding "re:" or "Fwd:" when there is no existing conversation thread. They explain that fabricating a sense of ongoing communication is deceptive, can damage credibility, and is explicitly prohibited by the CAN‑SPAM Act, which bans deceptive headers and subject lines. The speaker emphasizes that the practice is widely recognized as unethical and advises listeners to avoid it. The clip ends with a short call‑to‑action encouraging listeners to subscribe to the podcast.

Chapters

misleading subject lines. So using the re: or the forward: suggests ongoing communication where there isn't one, right? So if you're in a thread with someone and you're using that and there's been conversation, like, and you hit reply, like, that obviously automatically happens. But if you're using it out of context where there really is no thread and there wasn't ongoing comms, that is bad. Don't do that. Don't trick people. Everyone has kind of caught up to it now and it doesn't look good. As you mentioned, right, CAN-SPAM explicitly prohibits people doing kind of deceptive headers and subject lines, which that falls under. So that's a big one. Subscribe to the pod.