Most contractor newsletter templates are a layout. This one starts from a different premise: the moment you send a newsletter with an offer in it to a list of customers, it is a commercial electronic mail message and the CAN-SPAM Act attaches. The statute at 15 U.S.C. § 7704 sets out what has to be in it — header information that is not materially false or misleading, a subject heading that is not deceptive, clear and conspicuous identification that the message is an advertisement, clear and conspicuous notice of the opportunity to decline further messages, a functioning opt-out mechanism, and a valid physical postal address for the sender. The implementing rule is 16 C.F.R. Part 316. Neither competitor newsletter template mentions any of it, and both are gated downloads that ask for your email before showing you the file.
The physical postal address is the requirement most contractors get wrong, because they assume a website and a phone number cover it. They do not. The rule defines a valid physical postal address as exactly three things: the sender's current street address, a Post Office box the sender has accurately registered with the United States Postal Service, or a private mailbox the sender has accurately registered with a commercial mail receiving agency established under Postal Service regulations. The word doing the work in the second and third options is "accurately registered" — a box in a partner's name, or one whose registration details went stale two moves ago, is not a valid physical postal address. This builder asks which of the three you are using and, for the two box options, asks you to confirm the registration is actually yours before it will stop flagging it.
The two opt-out clocks are the other thing that gets missed, and they are different clocks. The first is the mechanism: whatever you give people to unsubscribe with — a link, a reply address — has to remain capable of receiving opt-out requests for no less than 30 days after the message was transmitted. Contractors who run a campaign through a tool and then close the campaign break this one without noticing. The second is the honouring: once someone opts out, you may not send them another commercial email more than 10 business days after you receive the request. This builder computes both dates from your send date and prints them. Business days here are counted Monday to Friday; federal holidays are not modelled, because no authority publishes a CAN-SPAM holiday table and inventing one would produce a deadline nobody could defend. Treat the printed date as the outside edge.
There is also a set of things your opt-out may never ask for. Under 16 C.F.R. § 316.5, a sender may not require the recipient to pay a fee, to provide any information other than an email address and opt-out preferences, or to take any step beyond sending a reply email or visiting a single web page. An unsubscribe flow that makes someone log in, or that asks why they are leaving before it will let them go, is not a compliant unsubscribe. The review flags all three of those as critical, because each one is a violation on its own regardless of how good the rest of the footer is.
The advertisement label has one exception and only one. A commercial email needs clear and conspicuous identification that it is an advertisement or solicitation, and the statute switches that requirement off where the recipient gave prior affirmative consent to receive the message. That is a narrow carve-out — consent given for the newsletter specifically, not the fact that someone once bought a water heater from you. Separately, the definition of "commercial electronic mail message" excludes transactional or relationship messages entirely: a recall or safety notice about equipment you sold, or the delivery of a service under an agreement the customer already made, sits outside the whole regime except for the accurate-header rule, which binds both kinds of message. The builder classifies your issue from the sections you turned on and tells you which set applies, and it errs toward "commercial" when the content does not resolve cleanly, because that is the only reading that cannot cost you money.
On money: the FTC enforces CAN-SPAM as if a violation were the violation of a rule under section 18(a)(1)(B) of the FTC Act, so the per-violation civil penalty is the FTC Act figure at 16 C.F.R. § 1.98(d) — and each separate email is its own violation. The last figure this builder verified from the Federal Register is $53,088 per email, the 2025 inflation adjustment. The FTC re-adjusts most Januaries, and rather than print a number that may have moved, the builder says the current-year figure is not evaluated and points you at § 1.98(d). Separately, a state attorney general may recover up to $250 per message under 15 U.S.C. § 7706(f)(3), capped at $2,000,000, which a court may treble for willful or aggravated violations.
None of which is a reason to write a legal notice instead of a newsletter. The content model here is the other half of the build: ordered sections, each with a copy budget in wrapped lines derived from the printed page rather than a word count, so an issue that will not fit is caught while you are typing it. At 100 characters a line the whole issue gets 84 lines across 2 letter pages, and every section has its own share of that. Lead with a GFCI test-button reminder that takes the reader two minutes and finds a dead outlet. One offer. One call to action. An electrical newsletter earns trust by being specific. A breaker that trips twice a month, a GFCI that no longer trips at all, a panel with heat marks — name the symptom, say what it means, and the call comes without an offer attached. If you also print and mail it, switch on the print variant — a mailed newsletter is not an electronic mail message, so the unsubscribe block comes off the printed page and the review stops grading it, which is the sort of distinction a layout template has no way to make.