UCE Fallout - Newsletter/Mailing List Confirmations are SPAM?

battlemage asks: "According to this Article [heise.de; Google translation - pretty unreadable], a german court decided on 9/19/02 that the common confirmation E-Mails sent to new subscribers of newsletters could be considered unsolicited e-mail, aka SPAM, if they are sent to somebody who did not actually subscribe. According to German laws, this could actually mean fines for the site running the newsletter. They said it was the site owners obligation to prove that somebody actually requested such e-mail. The question is, how would that be possible without e-mail and without cost-intensive Passport/ID/CreditCard-Checks? I do work on a website in my free-time, and we would probably like to offer newsletters in the future, but I'm now unsure how we could do that." Mailing list and newsletter admins in other countries might do well to keep an eye on this in case such laws migrate to their area.