What is cold emailing illegal? A cold email is an unsolicited email sent to the recipient without prior contact to establish a relationship with potential customers and move them forward in the sales funnel. Unsolicited emails can be defined as the text equivalent of a cold call growbots.com/blog/sales-outreach-email-spam-laws . Along with transactional and warm emails, cold emails are a subset of email marketing. Although cold email campaigns have nothing to do with spam, unsolicited sales emails can be considered spam if cold email laws are not followed.