B2B cold email is common business practice, but it has legal and practical limits. For contacts that are corporate and not personal data of a specific individual, outreach is usually permissible on the basis of legitimate interest; for addresses containing an employee's name, the situation is more complex and is assessed individually. In every case, there is an obligation to identify yourself clearly, state where the contact came from, and allow easy opt-out from further communication. In practice, relevance is what decides: sending the same message in bulk to hundreds of companies gets a low response, damages the domain's reputation and often ends up in the spam folder. A smaller number of specifically prepared messages sent from an ordinary work mailbox, not from a bulk tool, is more effective.
See also: Cold contact, Legitimate interest in marketing, Sender reputation.
