ePrivacy
EU rules (a Directive) on electronic marketing and cookies — member countries implement details in national law.
Say it out loud
“The EU email rule. It is a Directive, so every country wrote its own version and they are not identical.”
The ePrivacy Directive sets the EU-wide shape — consent for marketing email to individuals, with a narrow customer exception — but because it is a Directive rather than a Regulation, each member state implemented it in national law. The differences are real and they are where the enforcement happens.
Yours
Nobody does this for you.
What goes wrong
Writing one “EU policy”. France's tracking-pixel position, Germany's four-part customer exception and Italy's timeline are separate obligations with separate dates. Treating the EU as one jurisdiction is how a compliant German programme becomes a French problem.
The dated rules behind this
A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.
See also
Where this sits
Stop 1, you get the address. Someone hands you an email address, and the terms of that handover decide everything after it.