When should you use Physical address included?
email-physical-address-present · functional · required
When should you use this check?
Run this on commercial mail to US recipients, where CAN-SPAM requires the sender's physical postal address in the message, and on Canadian sends under CASL. It belongs on the delivered message rather than the template, because the address usually lives in an inherited footer block — the part most likely to be carried forward from an old campaign and least likely to be re-read. Detection is postcode-anchored and uses postal addressing standards, so a real address counts in whatever format your footer writes it.
When should you not?
Do not run it on transactional mail, which is exempt from the requirement — a receipt or password reset with no postal address is not a defect, and failing it produces compliance noise rather than compliance. Senders operating only under regimes that do not mandate an in-message address, such as UK PECR or the Australian Spam Act, should disable the check rather than configure it. Check the purpose of the mail before including it: the statute distinguishes commercial solicitation from service messages, and so should your audit set.
What does it inspect?
Strip HTML tags from body and match physical address patterns (street number + street + city/state/postal code).
What does a failure mean?
A failure means no sender postal address was found in the message. For commercial mail to US recipients that is a direct statutory exposure, and because footers are inherited it is rarely limited to the campaign you audited — one failure usually describes a family of templates. A subtler variant is worth knowing about: mail that contains the *recipient's* address, such as a shipping confirmation, can look addressed while carrying nothing about the sender, which is why recipient-address labels are recognised and excluded rather than counted.
What are the Standard defaults — and why?
Three parameters carry the check. `expectedAddressCountries` defaults to `["US"]` and selects which country anchor rules run, because only the US and Canada mandate an in-message address. `senderPostalAddress` defaults to empty, which falls back to presence-only detection — the statute requires the *sender's* address, not merely an address, and without knowing yours the check can only confirm that one is there. `recipientAddressLabels` defaults to the common shipping and billing labels so a recipient's own address is not mistaken for the sender's.
How does an agent call it?
{
"type": "email",
"validations": [
"email-physical-address-present"
]
}
Who governs the Standard?
Schemafirst.org publishes community-governed standards for digital QA. ArbiterQA is a sponsor and commercial licensee of those standards; citation does not mean Schemafirst operates ArbiterQA.
Author ArbiterQA · Reviewed by ArbiterQA · 2026-08-14