First, the disclaimer this page owes you: this is deliverability practitioners reading regulations out loud, not legal advice. Where you’re incorporated, where your recipients live, and what your mail contains all change the answer—when money rides on it, ask a lawyer.
Why the answer leans yes
- CAN-SPAM (US). Commercial email to US recipients must include your valid physical postal address. The FTC’s guidance allows a street address, a registered PO Box, or a private mailbox from a commercial agency—so “I work from home” has workable answers that aren’t your living room. Violations are priced per email, which concentrates the mind.
- CASL (Canada) and friends. Canada’s regime requires sender identification including a mailing address in commercial electronic messages; plenty of other jurisdictions have identification requirements in the same spirit. If your list is international—and every list is—the union of applicable rules looks a lot like “just include it”.
- It reads as legitimacy. Beyond compliance, an identifiable sender with a real-world address is one more signal separating you from the spam cohort, for recipients and for the humans who review mail streams when things get escalated.
Where the “it depends” lives
- Transactional email is generally exempt. Receipts, password resets, shipping notices—mail whose primary purpose is the transaction—doesn’t carry CAN-SPAM’s commercial-email requirements. Mixed-content mail gets judged by its primary purpose, which is exactly the kind of edge a lawyer earns their fee on.
- Jurisdiction math. A pure-transactional sender with no promotional program has a plausible “no”. The moment a newsletter or promotion exists, the safe default is the address in the footer, right next to the unsubscribe link the same laws care about.
The practical move
Put the address in your marketing footer template once and stop thinking about it. It costs a line of text, it’s required more often than not, and no one has ever damaged their deliverability by being easy to identify.