What are requirements for physical address display?
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You send a marketing email, and CAN-SPAM says a physical mailing address has to be somewhere in it. This applies to every commercial email you send to U.S. recipients, no exceptions. Most other major regulations, including CASL and frameworks tied to GDPR, have similar rules. It's one of the cheapest compliance wins available: one line of text in your footer.
The address needs to be a real, deliverable postal address where your organization can actually receive mail. That covers your current street address, a P.O. box registered in your name, or a mailbox at a commercial mail receiving agency. If you're a solo operator working from home and you don't want to publish a personal address, renting a P.O. box or a registered mail service address is the standard workaround. What doesn't count: made-up addresses, addresses belonging to someone else, or locations you no longer operate from.
Placement and legibility matter too. The address should appear in every commercial email, usually in the footer alongside your unsubscribe link. It needs to be readable: don't hide it in white text, don't shrink it below 10px, and don't bury it under seven lines of legal disclaimers. Spam filters read footer quality as a trust signal, so a clean, visible footer actually helps your deliverability, not just your compliance record. Check your footer layout against what your ESP renders on mobile, since small text collapses badly on phones.
If you manage multiple brands or legally separate entities, each one needs its own address in its respective sends. You can't share one address across unrelated organizations. And if your address ever changes, update it in your ESP's global footer settings first, then audit your transactional templates and any evergreen automations still running. Missing one template is a compliance gap, even if it's a low-volume flow.
The fastest audit is to pull up your last three campaigns in preview mode and check: is there a physical address, is it current, and can you read it at mobile size? If you're using a mail receiving service, verify you're actually checking that box. That's the whole requirement, and it takes about ten minutes to confirm.
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