Remove your mailing address from MailChimp newsletters

By law (The CAN-SPAM act in the U.S. and other laws elsewhere) if someone is sending out email on your behalf, they need to have a real physical mailing address for you. If your emails are commercial in nature (as for instance if they include content from the website you created to sell your books), each email you send also must include this address.

If the only address you have is your home, you may well not want to reveal its address to the public. However, Mailchimp insists on putting it in, and as best I can determine there’s no way to stop it. So, even if your email is definitely non-commercial, there’s not a way to remove this address from it.

(In Campaigns, you can use the “content” editor to edit the footer and remove the included address, but if you do that, MailChimp adds an additional footer that still contains the information).

To avoid using your home address, you can use a P.O. box or other “front” address, such as a UPS rental mailbox. There are also online services, less expensive than those options, which will scan paper mail and send you pictures of it. Or you can use a work address or anything else where the mail will actually reach you. Using a false address is probably a bad idea since the potential penalties under CAN-SPAM are fairly expensive.

The other thing to consider is just going ahead and using your home address. While you might not feel comfortable publishing it, if you’re using your own name, and it’s not a super common name, and your bio says what city or even state you live in, your address is already very easy to find via a free service like whitepages.com. So it might not be worth a lot of effort to hide this information.

That said, if you still want a way to send email newsletters that don’t contain a valid physical address, I suggest you use mailerlite.com instead. Like MailChimp, it’s free for small volume accounts. They are, however, annoying in other ways which I detail here.