Short answer: inviting individual guests by SMS or email requires prior consent, inviting dealers and corporate contacts does not, and in both cases the address has to be registered in İYS. Article 6(1) of Law No. 6563 on the Regulation of Electronic Commerce allows commercial electronic messages only if the recipient's prior consent has been obtained, while Article 6(2) lifts that requirement for tradespeople and merchants. The Regulation on Commercial Communication and Commercial Electronic Messages adds two more rules in Article 5: anyone who wants to send commercial electronic messages registers with İYS, and no commercial electronic message may be sent to a recipient whose consent is not recorded in İYS. Article 7(12) of the same Regulation treats consent that was never uploaded to İYS as invalid. The word invitation does not put you outside this regime either, because Article 5 also covers messages sent to raise brand recognition through congratulations and good wishes. What follows: which rule applies to which guest, what must appear inside the invitation, where SMS and email quietly part ways, and what the fines look like in 2026.
Does an event invitation count as a commercial electronic message?
The definition sits in the law itself. Article 2(c) of Law No. 6563 describes a commercial electronic message as data, voice and visual content sent for commercial purposes in an electronic environment using tools such as telephone, call centres, fax, automatic dialling machines, smart voice recorders, email and short message service. Article 5 of the Regulation lists the purposes: promoting goods and services, marketing them, promoting the business, or raising recognition through content such as congratulations and good wishes. That last phrase pulls most invitations in, because a launch or gala invitation is about brand recognition. The carve-outs are written down too. Article 2(2) of the Regulation excludes messages sent by foundation universities and other private education institutions to their students and those students' parents, messages sent by professional organisations with public institution status, public benefit associations and tax exempt foundations to their members about the activities of their own commercial enterprises, and messages sent by public legal entities to inform the public. A graduation ceremony invitation sent by a foundation university to its own students and their parents falls inside that second item. The same ceremony announced by a sponsor brand to its own list does not.
Individual guests: consent first, then the İYS record
Article 6(1) of the law is one sentence. Commercial electronic messages may be sent to recipients only if their prior consent has been obtained. The 2020 amendment added a second condition, so collecting permission is no longer the whole job. Article 7(11) of the Regulation requires consent obtained outside İYS to be uploaded to İYS by the service provider within three business days, and Article 7(12) declares consent that was not uploaded invalid. A signed form in your drawer is not enough; it has to be in the system. The Regulation also dictates how consent is collected. Article 7(4) closes the most common trap: you may not request consent by sending a commercial electronic message to the recipient's electronic contact address. Emailing people to ask for permission is itself a breach. Article 7(5) says that where consent is embedded in a contract, it goes at the end of the document, before the affirmative statement or the signature, under a commercial electronic message side heading, in at least twelve point type, with the option to refuse included. Article 7(8) bans pre-ticked boxes and Article 7(9) bans making consent a precondition for the service. When consent is taken electronically, confirmation that it was received, together with a way to opt out, reaches the recipient within 24 hours. For consent taken outside İYS, the burden of proof lies with the service provider.
Dealers and corporate guests: how the merchant exemption works
Here the regime genuinely changes. Article 6(2) of the law is direct: commercial electronic messages may be sent to tradespeople and merchants without prior consent. Article 6(3) of the Regulation repeats it and adds a condition, namely that once a merchant or tradesperson has exercised the right to refuse, no message may be sent without consent. Who counts as a merchant comes from the Turkish Commercial Code. Under Article 12 of Law No. 6102, a person who operates a commercial enterprise in their own name, even partially, is a merchant; under Article 16, commercial companies are also merchants; Article 15 defines the tradesperson separately. Your dealer network, your suppliers and the corporate addresses of your business customers sit inside that definition. The exemption does not end the work. Article 6(6) of the Regulation requires the service provider to record those merchant and tradesperson contact addresses in İYS before sending, and to check through İYS whether they have exercised their right to refuse. Dealer meetings carry one more detail. Under Article 7(6), consent given to one party of a dealership agreement counts as given to the other party as well, limited to the goods, services or brand covered by that agreement. Article 9(2) builds the mirror image: a refusal notice served on one party counts as served on all of them.
Can you email guests who already registered?
This distinction is what saves the event day. Article 6(1) of the Regulation says that where a recipient has provided contact details so that they can be contacted, no separate consent is needed for messages about changes to, use of, or maintenance of the goods or services supplied. Article 6(2) widens the list to notices about an ongoing subscription, membership or partnership, plus collections, debt reminders, information updates, purchase and delivery and similar situations. The final sentence of that paragraph draws the line: such notices may not encourage or promote any goods or services. In practice this means you can tell a registered congress attendee that the hall has changed, that a session has moved, or that their entry code was reissued. Add next month's launch invitation to the bottom of that same email and the message becomes promotional, which puts it back under the consent regime. Article 6(5) notes that messages in this category are not checked against İYS, so the operational notice list and the invitation list also run on separate rails. Do not merge them into one template. Article 9(5) offers the reverse comfort: a recipient who has opted out can still be sent notices that other legislation makes mandatory.
What has to appear inside the invitation?
Article 8 of the Regulation itemises the content, and this is where most invitation templates fall short. The subject line or body carries the MERSİS number and trade name for merchants, and the name, surname and national identity or tax number for tradespeople. Where limited space is used, as with SMS, merchants give the MERSİS number and tradespeople the name, surname and national identity or tax number. In voice calls it is the trade name, or the name and surname for a tradesperson. A brand or business name may be added on top of those details, not instead of them. Article 8(5) requires at least one accessible contact detail such as a telephone, fax or SMS number or an email address. Article 8(6) adds a labelling rule: if the nature of the message is not clear from the content, a defining term such as promotion, campaign or information notice is inserted, at the start of an SMS, in the subject field of an email, and at the beginning of a voice call. If the invitation carries a prize draw, a gift or a discount, Article 8(7) requires that to be stated openly, and Article 8(8) requires the validity period and the conditions the recipient must meet to be presented through an easily reachable method such as a dedicated URL or a customer service number. The option to refuse appears in every commercial electronic message and has to be easy and free of charge through the same channel the message arrived on.
SMS or email? Article 17/A moves the risk
Send the same invitation through two channels and the responsibility does not sit in the same place. Article 11 of the Regulation gives the intermediary service provider two duties: it does not initiate transmission for service providers that are not registered with İYS, and before transmission it checks through İYS whether recipients have given consent, withholding delivery where they have not. Article 17/A switches those paragraphs off for messages sent by email. In operational terms, an invitation SMS to a number without consent is blocked upstream, while an invitation email to an address without consent goes out. The control is entirely on the sender. Complaint statistics reflect the gap. According to an Anadolu Agency report dated 16 March 2024, complaints filed through the Commercial Electronic Message Complaint System between 2015 and the end of 2023 reached 866,164, with 77.08 percent about SMS, 20.9 percent about voice calls and 2.02 percent about email. Administrative fines issued over the same period totalled 398,094,293 lira. One more point: Article 11(4) prohibits an intermediary service provider from collecting consent on behalf of others. Consent belongs in the brand's account, not the agency's or the sending platform's. Article 4 of the Regulation defines the İYS number as a unique number assigned separately to each service provider and each of its brands, so the list has to sit under whichever brand the invitation goes out in the name of.
Opt-outs, complaints and records: three business days, three months, three years
Three numbers set the rhythm. Once a refusal notice arrives, the service provider stops sending within three business days and reports the refusals it receives to İYS within three business days. A refusal invalidates the consent for the channel it was made on, so a guest who opts out of SMS does not automatically drop off the email list, though that channel closes. Recipients can also exercise the right to refuse through İYS directly. On complaints the window is three months. Under Article 14 of the Regulation, an application is made within three months of the date the commercial electronic message was sent, through the e-Government gateway, İYS or the Ministry website, and a complainant can only file about messages sent to addresses that belong to them. The application first goes through a preliminary review in İYS, after which the information and documents requested by the provincial directorate must be delivered within fifteen days of notification, extendable once by up to fifteen more days. On retention the figure is three years: consent records are kept for three years from the date the consent ceased to be valid, and other records relating to commercial electronic messages for three years from the date of recording, to be submitted to the Ministry on request. Data protection is a separate file. Article 10 of the law, which covered personal data, was repealed by Law No. 7416 of 1 July 2022, while Article 12 of the Regulation requires prior consent from the data subject before personal data are shared with third parties, processed or used for other purposes. İYS consent and the transparency duties under Law No. 6698 are built separately.
The 2026 fine amounts, and the order to build your invite list in
The amounts are revised every year. The administrative fines in Article 12 of the law were reset for 1 January to 31 December 2026 by a Ministry of Trade communiqué published in Official Gazette No. 33118 of 25 December 2025. Sending messages without consent, a breach of Article 6(1), falls under Article 12(1)(a) and carries 2,859 to 14,309 lira. Article 12(2) provides that where messages are sent to more than one person at once without consent, that fine is increased up to tenfold, and since an invitation send always has multiple recipients the ceiling rises to 143,090 lira. Missing identification and contact details in the message fall under item (b) at 2,859 to 28,620 lira. Failing to offer a refusal mechanism, or failing to stop sending within three business days, falls under item (c) at 5,723 to 42,930 lira. Item (d), which covers non compliance with secondary legislation issued by the Ministry, runs from 28,620 to 286,206 lira for each breach, and since the İYS obligations live in the Regulation rather than the law, that is the item that comes into play. If the same breach recurs within one year of the fine being served, the previous amount is doubled. The fine is issued by the provincial director where the service provider's registered head office sits, and it is paid within one month of notification. Work the calendar backwards: split the guest list into individual and merchant columns, upload consents and merchant addresses to İYS before you send, put the MERSİS number and the opt-out link into the template, define a three business day flow for refusals, and keep the records for three years. Tales Event is based in Istanbul and runs stage, sound, lighting and LED screen production with a single team for dealer meetings, launches, openings, gala nights and graduation ceremonies across Türkiye. Tell us your guest profile and your event date, and we will map the invitation flow together with registration and check-in.
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