Cold Email and GDPR: What to Read Before You Send

Which official sources to use for UK and EU questions about B2B email, and what your own record must be able to show.

Whether a B2B cold email is lawful is not a yes printed on a marketing site. In the UK, start with the ICO's guidance on electronic mail and on legitimate interests. In the EU, start with your lead supervisory authority and the text of the UK or EU GDPR plus the e-privacy rules that sit beside it. PECR in the UK treats corporate and individual subscribers differently. This page is not legal advice and it does not restate those rules as a shortcut.

What you can do operationally, whatever the lawyer concludes: store why you have the address, what you sent, and the moment they told you to stop. Honour that stop on every channel, not only on the thread they replied to.

How the tool should behave

Sendblox should not draft a message for a suppressed contact, and a person should still read anything that claims a fact. The product does not supply a lawful basis. Your record of purpose does. If that purpose is 'we bought a list', do not expect a paragraph of legitimate interest to repair it. Read the ICO's legitimate-interests guidance before you write one.

Before you publish a change for cold email GDPR, write down the date, the record you edited, and the one message you used as a test. A week later, check whether that test still matches production. Provider rules, DNS includes, and CRM fields all move. A page that was true in general can be wrong on your domain if nobody looked again. Keep the send small until that check is dull. One contact, one objective, a person reading the draft. If the test fails, stop the campaign. Do not widen it to see whether a larger list forgives a broken setup.

Before you publish a change for cold email GDPR, write down the date, the record you edited, and the one message you used as a test. A week later, check whether that test still matches production. Provider rules, DNS includes, and CRM fields all move. A page that was true in general can be wrong on your domain if nobody looked again. Keep the send small until that check is dull. One contact, one objective, a person reading the draft. If the test fails, stop the campaign. Do not widen it to see whether a larger list forgives a broken setup.