Are there different laws for different countries and how do I comply?

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The Regulations state: "A service provider shall ensure that any unsolicited commercial communication sent by him by electronic mail is clearly and unambiguously identifiable as such as soon as it is received."

The Regulations are silent on how to identify such messages. A US federal law, the CAN-SPAM Act charged a task force with preparing a plan to require spam to include the characters 'ADV' in the subject line. Such requirements existed already in some states. The Federal Trade Commission later concluded that the labelling plan would fail. It was not added to the federal law.

The UK's main law for dealing with spam is the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003, which implemented an EU Directive. It requires businesses generally to have prior consent before sending unsolicited commercial email to "individual subscribers". In effect that bans spam to addresses like john.smith@hotmail.com but does not ban spam to john-smith@company.com, the latter being a "corporate subscriber"

The E-commerce Directive gave Member States discretion to allow or forbid spam. This area of law is also excluded from the country of origin principle. So, while some spam is lawful in the UK, it is not lawful in, for example, Italy. A UK business cannot rely on UK law to justify the spamming of Italian consumers.

The Directive also says that businesses must consult regularly and respect opt-out registers before sending unsolicited commercial communications. The UK decided to omit this provision when implementing the Directive. The Government at the time considered that industry self-regulation and codes of conduct already gave effective protection to the recipients of spam.

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