It's pretty amazing the number of senders that do not obey the requirement for a minimal unsubscribe flow:

> Any opt-out mechanism you offer must be able to process opt-out requests for at least 30 days after you send your message. You must honor a recipient’s opt-out request within 10 business days. You can’t charge a fee, require the recipient to give you any personally identifying information beyond an email address, or make the recipient take any step other than sending a reply email or visiting a single page on an Internet website as a condition for honoring an opt-out request. Once people have told you they don’t want to receive more messages from you, you can’t sell or transfer their email addresses, even in the form of a mailing list.

To me it seems more of an honor-based system rather than one there's any enforcement for. Much like the Do Not Call list.

There have been a handful of prosecutions, but not nearly enough.

"unfortunately" ? Thank God we don't have the CAN-SPAM act in the UK. I'd be receiving unsolicited spam from all sorts of UK businesses if we did.

I don't care if a spam email has an unsubscribe link or the sender is clearly labelled. Once it's received and seen, the damage is done.

> CAN-SPAM only applies to senders in the U.S.

Given that SMTP is a relay system, would the first US-soil SMTP gateway machine a message travels through be its legal "sender" (in the way that e.g. the importer of a foreign medical device is liable if it's not FDA-approved)? One would think this would legally force those gateways, when handling foreign-originated spam, to slap their own address on them with their own unsubscribe link, that would—if clicked—then block those messages from coming through that gateway.

Mail is not actually sent over a series of SMTP relays, though. It's basically routed directly to the MX SMTP server for the domain.

Except in some corporate intranet setups, but that's not really relevant for this discussion.

> Also, CAN-SPAM only applies to senders in the U.S. (unfortunately).

We could always send gunboats to reduce cities whose citizens send unsolicited emails to the U.S. … /s

More seriously, this does seem like the sort of thing which could be addressed through bilateral or multilateral negotiations, including between the private firms who own the international Internet connexions.

I don't know if I would call it a "relationship" message, but maybe it's a "transactional" message, where serving the webpage counts as the transaction?

When I worked somewhere that did a decent amount of email marketing, we were told our abandoned cart emails were not transactional, as there were not actually a part of any kind of transaction (yet). Not sure on the actual status though.