Cold email
Cold email is a first email to someone who has not asked to hear from you, sent because something about their situation suggests they would want what you sell.
Cold email is a first email to someone who has not asked to hear from you. It is not defined by being unwanted or by being sent in bulk. It is defined by the absence of a prior relationship, which is why the same message can be legitimate business correspondence or spam depending on facts that have nothing to do with its wording.
Three things separate one from the other. The first is relevance: a real reason this person, specifically, would care, which usually means something they built, wrote, hired for, or announced. The second is a lawful basis to contact them at all, which in the EU and UK means a legitimate interest you can articulate, and in the US means honouring the CAN-SPAM rules on identification and opt-out. The third is a working way out, honoured immediately and without conditions.
The common mistake is treating volume as the lever. Sending more of a message that does not earn a reply lowers the reply rate, raises the complaint rate, and damages the domain doing the sending, so the same campaign gets worse over time rather than better. The number that matters is replies per thousand sent, and it moves on relevance rather than on quantity.
In practice
- An email to a founder who just posted about hiring their first salesperson, from a company that sells sales tooling.
- A note to an engineering lead referencing an open-source library they maintain, from a company whose product depends on it.
- Not cold email: a follow-up to somebody who downloaded a whitepaper and gave you their address.
Questions
Is cold email legal?
In most jurisdictions yes, business-to-business, with conditions. CAN-SPAM in the US requires accurate headers, a clear identification of who is sending, a physical postal address, and an opt-out you honour within ten business days. It does not require prior consent. GDPR and PECR in the EU and UK are stricter: you need a lawful basis, usually legitimate interest, which means being able to explain why this specific recipient would reasonably expect to hear from you, and you must tell them where their data came from. Consumer email is a different matter and generally needs consent. None of this is legal advice, and the rules for your country and industry are worth checking properly.
How is cold email different from spam?
Spam is unsolicited bulk email sent without regard to whether the recipient is a plausible buyer, usually with a disguised or missing sender and no honest way out. Cold email is unsolicited but not bulk in that sense: it is aimed, it identifies the sender truthfully, and it takes one click to stop. The recipient is the one who decides which of the two you sent, and the complaint rate on your domain is how you find out.
How many cold emails a day is safe to send?
It depends on the age and reputation of the sending domain rather than on any universal number. A new domain sending at volume is the single clearest spam signal there is, which is why sending ramps over weeks rather than starting at full rate. A mature domain with a good reputation and a low complaint rate can sustain far more than a new one. The right cap is the one where your bounce and complaint rates stay flat as volume rises; when they climb, you are already sending too much.
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