emailrules.today
Stop 7 of 8Week oneMinutes to days

Opt-out

The person can stop your marketing email easily — and you must honour it.

Say it out loud

“The unsubscribe. It has to be easy, it has to be fast, and it has to apply everywhere we send from.”

Opt-out is the exit. Laws and mailbox providers set how fast you must stop, and they set different clocks: CAN-SPAM allows ten business days, Gmail and Yahoo expect bulk senders to process one-click requests within two. Honouring an opt-out is a separate obligation from whether you needed opt-in to begin with.

The testWhat makes an unsubscribe non-compliantPublished valuesscrolls →
Requires logging in NO
Asks why before it will process NO

You may ask after. Not before, and not as a condition.

Charges a fee NO
Only removes one campaign type by default RISKY

A preference centre is fine as long as "all marketing" is one visible click, not four.

One click, done, confirmation shown YES
CAN-SPAM 10 business days
Gmail/Yahoo 2 days for one-click requests
CASL 10 business days

Part yours

The platform does part; the rest is genuinely yours.

What goes wrong

Honouring the unsubscribe in the marketing platform but not in the transactional tool, the SMS platform, or the sales sequencer. From the recipient's side it is one brand, and the second message after an unsubscribe is what turns a quiet exit into a complaint.

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 7, a human reacts. Somebody opens, clicks, ignores, unsubscribes, or presses the button that costs you the most.

← BeforeComplaint rate / spam rateNext →Open rate

FAQ

Awkward questions

Who is this actually for?

People who ship email and are too busy to re-read every PDF: week-one marketers, lifecycle/CRM, deliverability, multi-country ops, DTC brands, agencies — on Klaviyo, Mailchimp, Braze, HubSpot, SFMC, or something else. Pick your tool and geos so product-specific pages only appear when they match. EU and UK are first-class filters. Not for people who sell tools about email and need a fake score to demo.

Why only ~40 rules? Isn’t that… thin?

On purpose. A wall of 400 undated “best practices” is how you look busy and still get burned. Every page needs a primary source we actually read. Thin and checkable beats fat and folklore. Europe, bulk inbox rules, measurement honesty, and protocol topics like BIMI/DMARC policy are on the shelf when we can cite them — not every Member State and not every vendor myth. Coverage map lists what we still refuse to invent.

Is this legal advice?

No. If it were, you’d have a billable hour and a longer PDF. This is a dated operator reference written by an email geek. Confirm anything high-stakes with counsel who knows your facts. Same for “will this make me compliant?” — no tool does that. Lawyers and judges do. We say what the sources say and what to do first on Monday.

Why no trust score out of 100?

Because we refuse to invent a number you can’t audit. Fake scores sell seed tests and panic. You get findings, dates, and links. If that feels less exciting than a red dial, good — you’re not the red-dial customer.

Why should I trust you more than my ESP’s blog?

ESPs sell seats. Seed-score vendors sell fear. AI invents citations when nobody watches. We sell nothing today — no pixels, no placement scores, no affiliate — so we can say when a tool is the problem. A human verifies, dates, and corrects in public. Tools may help draft; they do not ship unsourced claims. Check the primary links. Fail that test and leave.

Do I need an account?

No. Filters live in this browser and the URL. Share the link. That’s it. Accounts come later only if they earn it — not so we can nurture you about email.

I’m an agency. Where’s multi-client mode?

We tried a client-name CRM on the setup card. It made the product feel like work before it felt useful. Role filters + copy link + one-page brief (optional PDF title) is enough for now. Complexity comes back when the free shelf is habit, not before.

Is the quiet changelog a bug?

No. Quiet means nothing material moved. We don’t invent urgency so the homepage looks “alive.” Sticky risks still show what usually needs a person when the market is still.