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Comment by zandert | Hacker News Reader

Really makes me appreciate that unsolicited emails are illegal in some European countries like Germany

Unfortunately, not in a business context, where marketers can claim "legitimate interest" in various ways. Also, in which way would it matter that they are illegal? Random companies keep sending them anyway; there are virtually no legal repercussions here.

Curious, do you mean in business to business?

Otherwise I don't think you can argue any legitimate interest.

Yes, I mean cold sales emails – marketers reaching out to CEOs or other decision makers, selling them staff augmentation services, growth hacking, marketing support, lead generation, design services, etc. They'd claim legitimate interest by "personalizing" the email and claiming that it is relevant for you in a business sense. (Anyway, I don't think that these are fully compliant with GDPR either, because most often, they will have scraped your email address from somewhere, and do not provide a way to unsubscribe.)

Interesting, In my country that also seems to be illegal, e.g. cold calling can never be a valid reason(without consent).

https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...

Edit:clarified never

Some countries provide some official places to complain about cold calls/emails, so at least it puts the sender at risk.

It boils down to a risk/reward trade-off, but I doubt that someone would as easily send thousands of spam mails, and also publicly boast about it

We still get them unfortunately

I think that they’re as illegal as they are in the US, not more. I think it’s perfectly fine to “cold-call” people but then you’re not allowed to send more emails unless they subscribe or respond.

In reality it’s very easy to end up subscribing to newsletters and even my European embassy subscribed me to their event newsletter in Thailand—of course I never agreed to any of that.

No it is not allowed to cold call or send any emails without express permission from the recipient this is for austria/germany.

It seems that with the gpdr this is now eu wide:

https://gdpr.eu/email-encryption/

That’s not accurate. If your email is on your website, of course they can email you. If what you said was true in absolute terms, communication would be impossible.

They can contact you for legitimate reasons, which could be "hey, your website has content from me that is copyrighted" they can't contact you for sales reasons without your consent.

The law for that, at least in my country, is very clear: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/NormDokument.wxe?Abfrage=Bundesnor...

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