A law to curb spam was passed by Parliament yesterday. All marketing emails will require:

• an “ADV” (for advertisement) label in the email subject
• the subject should not be misleading
• emails must have an email address or phone number for recipients to unsubscribe themselves from the list

Exempt from this ruling are:

• messages sent by government agencies during a public emergency
• messages sent by government agencies “in the public interest”
• non-commercial messages - from charities and the like

Maybe ads should have a microformat, though it goes against the intentions of nefarious spammers.