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Legal

Opt-out

An opt-out is a recipient's request to stop being contacted. Honouring it is a legal requirement in every major market and has to apply across every list you hold, not just the campaign it came from.

For cold outreach a plain sentence offering to stop works better than a styled unsubscribe footer, which reads as bulk mail and invites the spam button. What matters legally is that the mechanism is clear, free, and actually processed.

Suppression has to be global and permanent. The common failure is a per-campaign list, so someone who opted out in March is contacted again in September by a different sequence — the fastest route to a complaint, and in the EU and UK an actual breach rather than an annoyance.

Related terms

Cold email
A cold email is a message to a business that has had no prior contact with you. It is lawful in most B2B contexts under specific conditions, and it works only when the list is right and the message is specific.
GDPR
GDPR is the EU regulation governing personal data. A named business address like anna@clinic.com is personal data under it, even though it belongs to a company — which is the point most lead-generation advice gets wrong.
CAN-SPAM
CAN-SPAM is the US law governing commercial email. It permits cold outreach without prior consent, provided the headers are accurate, the message is identifiable, a physical address is included and opt-outs are honoured within ten business days.
List hygiene
List hygiene is the habit of removing addresses that bounce, never engage, or should never have been added, so your sending reputation is not spent on people who are not there.