Email Signature Legal Requirements by Country

There is no single international standard for what an email signature must contain, and the obligations split into two families. The first is company disclosure. The UK requires registered name, company number, place of registration, and registered office address on business email under the Companies Act 2006. Germany imposes comparable commercial register disclosure obligations on business correspondence, with the governing framework updated in recent years when the Digitale-Dienste-Gesetz (DDG) took over those disclosure duties. Several other EU member states impose similar registered-entity disclosure. These rules apply to business email generally, not only marketing. The second family is commercial message rules. The US CAN-SPAM Act requires a valid physical postal address and a working opt-out on commercial email but imposes nothing on ordinary business correspondence. Canada's CASL is stricter, requiring sender identification and an unsubscribe path on commercial electronic messages. The practical consequence for any company operating across borders is that the signature template needs to vary by the entity sending, not by the recipient, and that a single global template will usually be non-compliant somewhere. This is a general summary and not legal advice; the governing text for each jurisdiction should be checked.