Cold email is banned in Germany. Where it is lawful

Published: 26 August 2026 · 21 min readLaw and tax notesConsulting practiceRhein-Main

Cold email is banned in Germany. Where it is lawful

An owner in Frankfurt with 40 staff wants two things at once: to grow across the Rhein-Main region and to win customers in England and the United States. His question to us was a single one. May I write to companies that have never heard of me? In Germany the answer is no, and one Amtsgericht Düsseldorf decision awarded EUR 403.50 of reimbursable warning-letter costs for a single advertising email to a business recipient. The same email to a British limited company is lawful without any consent at all.

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

The decision

We send no cold advertising email to a recipient seated in Germany, Austria or Switzerland, at any volume. German prospects get an addressed letter or a LinkedIn connection request with no sales text in it. Email enters only where the recipient market's own law permits it, which means the United States, Ireland, and British corporations, and there only after a lawyer has looked at the campaign design. The trigger that would reverse this is one open question: whether a German competitor can attack, in a German court, an email that was lawfully delivered in London. Article 6(1) of the Rome II Regulation points against it. For this fact pattern it has not been decided. While that holds, the letter is our standing channel.

What German law says

The UWG is Germany's unfair-competition act, the rulebook for advertising. Its § 7 bans advertising that unreasonably harasses a market participant. Paragraph 2 lists the cases where the harassment is settled without any further weighing. Number 2 reads, in the wording read on 25 August 2026 at gesetze-im-internet.de:

"bei Werbung unter Verwendung einer automatischen Anrufmaschine, eines Faxgerätes oder elektronischer Post, ohne dass eine vorherige ausdrückliche Einwilligung des Adressaten vorliegt"

In plain words: advertising by automated calling machine, fax or electronic mail without the addressee's prior express consent. The decisive word is Adressat, the addressee. Number 1 of the same paragraph, one line above, bans cold advertising calls only "gegenüber einem Verbraucher", against a consumer. The legislature picked the narrow word for calls and the wide word for email, in adjacent items of the same list. That is why there is no business-to-business carve-out for advertising email. A Frankfurt trades firm is an addressee and it is protected.

Who can send a warning letter, and what it costs

An Abmahnung is a lawyer's letter that demands you stop and reimburse the sender's costs. § 8 Abs. 3 UWG gives that right to any competitor trading in the market to a not-insignificant extent and not merely occasionally, to trade associations entered on the official list under § 8b, to qualified consumer associations, and to the chambers of commerce. The recipient can also come at you directly under §§ 823 and 1004 BGB, the German civil code's tort and injunction provisions.

The money hangs on the Streitwert, the value a court assigns to the interest in stopping the conduct, because German lawyers' fees are computed from it. For a single email to a business recipient, published Streitwerte sit far apart: EUR 1,000 at LG Berlin, EUR 3,500 in the Düsseldorf case, EUR 6,000 at OLG Düsseldorf, EUR 7,500 at both LG Trier and LG Münster. The EUR 3,500 Streitwert produced EUR 403.50 of reimbursable costs. For a campaign of 2,000 emails, OLG Düsseldorf set a Streitwert of EUR 50,000. Our own planning band is EUR 500 to EUR 5,000 per recipient, and that is a planning figure rather than a survey of the case law.

The Vertragsstrafe, the penalty promised for a repeat breach, is capped at EUR 1,000 by § 13a Abs. 3 UWG where the breach affects market participants only marginally and the warned party normally employs fewer than 100 people. Whether § 13 Abs. 4 UWG removes cost reimbursement for a spam warning letter altogether looks doubtful to us: its Number 1 covers information and labelling duties in e-commerce, its Number 2 covers data-protection breaches, and a nuisance provision is neither. That is our reading of the wording and not a settled interpretation.

The correction we had to make to our own file

An earlier version of our internal channel table carried a fine of up to EUR 300,000 for unlawful advertising email. That is wrong. § 20 Abs. 1 Nr. 1 UWG penalises, in its own words, whoever advertises "mit einem Telefonanruf oder unter Verwendung einer automatischen Anrufmaschine gegenüber einem Verbraucher" without prior express consent, meaning by telephone call or automated calling machine, against a consumer. The ceiling of EUR 300,000 in paragraph 2 attaches to exactly that case, and paragraph 3 names the Bundesnetzagentur, the federal network agency, as the enforcing authority. On this wording, unsolicited business email carries no regulatory fine. The financial risk is a private warning letter, not the state.

The one exception: your own existing customers

§ 7 Abs. 3 UWG lifts the ban for your own customer relationship, and only when four conditions hold together: the address came from selling a product or service to that customer, the advertising concerns your own similar products or services, the customer has not objected, and they were told clearly about the right to object when the address was collected and in every single message. Drop one of the four and the ban applies again. Writing to your own customers, whose addresses came from an order, with an unsubscribe link in every message, sits inside the provision. A bought list, a trade-fair contact without an order, or an unrelated offer does not.

The other channels

Channel Status for German B2B Provision What follows from it
Addressed letter to the firm lawful without consent § 7 Abs. 1 UWG no statutory opt-out register, an express objection is binding
Advertising email unlawful without prior express consent § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG no B2B carve-out, warning-letter exposure per recipient
Advertising call to a firm only on presumed consent § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 1 UWG document a concrete, recipient-specific fact beforehand
LinkedIn connection request, no note carries no advertising content outside § 7 Abs. 2 opens the door only, cannot carry the offer
LinkedIn message with an offer grey zone, treat as email § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 by analogy we found no case law on this fact pattern
The target's own contact form contested, treat as email § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 by analogy no loophole, pinpoint citation unverified
WhatsApp, SMS unlawful without consent § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG electronic mail in the functional sense

As of 25 August 2026, statutory texts read that day at gesetze-im-internet.de. The classification of LinkedIn, contact forms and messengers is our reading of the wording, not case law.

The advertising call deserves its own line, because it is often mistaken for the easy way round. On 20 September 2007 the Bundesgerichtshof, Germany's federal civil supreme court, decided the "Suchmaschineneintrag" case (I ZR 88/05): an unsolicited advertising call to a business is lawful only where the caller could assume, from concrete circumstances, that the person called expects the call or is at least open to it. A free directory listing did not carry a call about a paid listing. Translated into practice, "every firm could use a better website" is a statement about a whole sector and not a fact about this one recipient. § 7a UWG adds that consent to telephone advertising is to be documented and kept for five years.

The seven-country map

What governs is the law of the market the advertising reaches, not the sender's seat. Article 6(1) of the Rome II Regulation designates, in its own words, "the law of the country where competitive relations or the collective interests of consumers are, or are likely to be, affected". Seven countries, seven different answers.

Country Cold advertising email to firms Provision Condition Sanction range
Germany no § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG prior express consent of the addressee warning letter and cost reimbursement, no fine under § 20 UWG
Austria no § 174 Abs. 3 TKG 2021 prior consent of the recipient administrative fine to EUR 50,000 (§ 188 Abs. 4 Z 28 TKG 2021)
Switzerland only mass advertising is caught Art. 3 Abs. 1 lit. o UWG (SR 241) consent, correct sender named, free and easy refusal route criminal on complaint, to three years or a monetary penalty (Art. 23 UWG)
United Kingdom yes, to corporations only PECR reg. 22(1) the rule reaches individual subscribers only, identify the sender and give an opt-out address (reg. 23) to GBP 500,000 under PECR, within the part it reaches
Ireland yes, sole traders included SI 336/2011 reg. 13(1) and 13(2) a work email address, content solely about that activity, stop on objection to EUR 250,000 for a body corporate on indictment (reg. 13(15))
USA yes, to anyone CAN-SPAM Act, 15 U.S.C. § 7701 et seq. accurate headers, ad identification, postal address, working opt-out to USD 53,088 per email
Canada yes, on three conditions CASL s. 10(9)(b) address conspicuously published by the recipient, no refusal notice beside it, message relevant to their role to CAD 1m (individual), CAD 10m (others)

As of 25 August 2026, every statutory text read that day at gesetze-im-internet.de, ris.bka.gv.at, fedlex.admin.ch, legislation.gov.uk, irishstatutebook.ie, ftc.gov and laws-lois.justice.gc.ca.

Four things the table does not show at a glance.

Austria is stricter than Germany, not milder. § 174 Abs. 3 TKG 2021, the Austrian telecommunications act, reads: "Die Zusendung einer elektronischen Post – einschließlich SMS – ist ohne vorherige Einwilligung des Empfängers unzulässig, wenn die Zusendung zu Zwecken der Direktwerbung erfolgt." Sending electronic mail, SMS included, for direct-marketing purposes without the recipient's prior consent is not permitted. On top of that sits an administrative fine to EUR 50,000 that Germany does not impose for email, and paragraph 6 deems an offence committed abroad to have been committed where the message reaches the user's connection. The RIS record for § 188 carries an expiry date of 30 September 2026, so the penalty range wants re-checking before any use.

Switzerland bans the mass, not the single message. Art. 3 Abs. 1 lit. o of the Swiss UWG catches whoever "Massenwerbung ohne direkten Zusammenhang mit einem angeforderten Inhalt fernmeldetechnisch sendet oder solche Sendungen veranlasst und es dabei unterlässt, vorher die Einwilligung der Kunden einzuholen, den korrekten Absender anzugeben oder auf eine problemlose und kostenlose Ablehnungsmöglichkeit hinzuweisen": sends mass advertising by telecommunications with no direct link to requested content, without first obtaining consent, naming the correct sender, and pointing to a free and easy way to refuse. Whether an individually written message to a researched recipient counts as mass advertising is a question of fact on which we checked no reliable case law. We treat Switzerland like Germany.

The British permission is a third the size it sounds. PECR reg. 22(1) opens with the sentence "This regulation applies to the transmission of unsolicited communications by means of electronic mail to individual subscribers." Corporations never fall inside it. Sole traders and ordinary partnerships, on the ICO's reading, are individual subscribers and are protected. At the start of 2025 the UK government counted 5.7m businesses: 2.1m companies (37%), 3.2m sole proprietorships (57%) and 368,000 ordinary partnerships (6%). Companies House publishes the full live-company register free every month, which makes the rule "no live company number, no email" a data task rather than a legal one. The ICO adds that the address of a named employee at a corporate body counts as a corporate subscriber, because the subscriber is the employer, and that where the status is unclear the stricter rule applies. Writing to a named person is processing personal data, and Article 27 UK GDPR asks for a UK representative once the processing stops being "occasional". We have not obtained a quote for that, and it stands in our planning as unverified.

Ireland is more open than the United Kingdom. Reg. 13(1) of SI 336/2011 protects only a "subscriber or user who is a natural person", and reg. 13(2) takes out of that an email address which "reasonably appears to the sender to be an email address used mainly by the subscriber or user in the context of their commercial or official activity", provided the message relates solely to that activity. That puts back exactly the group UK law excludes. The penalty our earlier research had to carry as unverified sits in reg. 13(15) and is confirmed today: to EUR 250,000 for a body corporate on conviction on indictment.

And the open question. Whether a German competitor or a trade association can attack, in a German court, an email that was lawful under UK law is unresolved. Article 6(1) Rome II points at the affected market, and § 3 Abs. 4 Nr. 3 DDG, Germany's digital services act, expressly takes the permissibility of unsolicited commercial email out of the country-of-origin principle, so a sender does not carry home law abroad. Article 6(2) Rome II points back at Article 4 where an act affects exclusively the interests of a specific competitor. We found no German decision on this fact pattern. That is an open question rather than a settled result, and it belongs in a lawyer's opinion before any first send.

What actually converts

The legal question decides whether a channel is open. It says nothing about whether it carries. Every figure below was checked at source on 25 August 2026.

Measure Value Basis
Cold email reply rate, average 3.43% Instantly, billions of interactions, 2025 data, published 12 January 2026
Reply rate, top quartile 5.5% same source
Reply rate, top decile 10.7% same source
Emails per meeting booked, average 344 Gong, over 28m cold emails, 24 July 2025
Top reps' advantage on meetings 8.1x same source
Spam-complaint ceiling under 0.30% Google Postmaster Tools and Yahoo, Google's target under 0.10%
Bulk-sender threshold 5,000 messages per day Google and Microsoft
Addressed post, prospect list 2% to 4.4% ANA response-rate reporting, secondary aggregation
Addressed post, own customers 5% to 9% same source
LinkedIn, cold connection acceptance 28.5% Expandi, 13.2m requests, May 2025 to April 2026
LinkedIn, reply to the connection note 3.0% same source
LinkedIn, reply to messages after acceptance 10.4% same source

As of 25 August 2026, every value read at source that day.

Three readings of the table.

The 3.43% is below the number quoted in sales conversations for email tooling. The usual 5% to 10% band traces to a 2019 Backlinko study that measured link-building outreach rather than sales prospecting. At 344 emails per meeting, a channel expected to produce ten meetings a month needs roughly 3,400 sends a month.

The 0.30% is the real constraint, not the statute. Google asks for a spam-complaint rate under 0.10% and advises never reaching 0.30%, and Yahoo names 0.3%. Three annoyed recipients in a thousand end a sending domain, whether the send was lawful in London, Dublin or Dallas.

Our own planning band for LinkedIn was 30% to 40% acceptance, taken from a dataset of 16,492 requests. The larger and newer dataset of 13.2m requests shows 28.5%, and the reply rate on the connection note fell from 3.5% to 2.2% across the year. We have moved our planning onto the larger dataset. Two further assumptions we carry have no published dataset behind them and stand as practitioner estimates: that German-language outreach is answered two to three times as often as English, and that German buyers need four to six touchpoints before a first conversation happens.

What we do in Frankfurt instead

Five parts, all inside the open zone of § 7 Abs. 1 UWG.

An addressed letter to a named owner. Never a mail-merge to "the management". The first paragraph states the publicly checkable reason we are writing to this company, and finished work is enclosed, usually a designed page or an analysis the recipient keeps whether or not they ever reply.

One QR code per letter. It leads to its own page and records a code and a timestamp. No name, no location, no device. That is enough to tell whether a letter type gets read, and it leaves no data trail on the recipient.

The sentence "Ich rufe Sie nicht an." I will not call you. It is printed in the letter. It is both the promise and the implementation of what the BGH required in I ZR 88/05: without a concrete, recipient-specific fact there is no presumed consent, and a first letter supplies none.

An Article 14 GDPR notice inside every letter to a named person. We did not collect the data from the person but from their own website and the public registers, so Article 14 owes them the information, and its paragraph 3 sets the deadline at the latest at the time of first communication. The legal basis is Article 6(1)(f), legitimate interests, which Recital 47 recognises for direct marketing and which we weigh in writing once per campaign. The objection right leads and sits apart, because Article 21(4) asks for exactly that: the notice "hat in einer verständlichen und von anderen Informationen getrennten Form zu erfolgen", in an intelligible form separate from any other information. Anyone outsourcing print and post needs a processor agreement under Article 28 before the first send.

Referrals with nothing changing hands. The Steuerberater, the tax adviser every German company keeps and listens to, is the person a Mittelstand owner believes first. § 9 StBerG reads: "Die Abgabe oder Entgegennahme eines Teils der Gebühren oder sonstiger Vorteile für die Vermittlung von Aufträgen, gleichviel ob im Verhältnis zu einem Steuerberater oder Steuerbevollmächtigten oder zu einem Dritten gleich welcher Art, ist unzulässig." Giving or taking a share of fees or any other benefit for passing on work is not permitted, expressly including toward a third party of any kind. A tax adviser may therefore recommend us. He may take no commission, no discount, no gift and no free work for his own practice. Offering a tax adviser a referral fee puts him in difficulty and produces no referral.

What this means for you

For owners growing at home:

  • Price the letter against the email you are not allowed to send. Addressed post to a prospect list answers at 2% to 4.4%, against 3.43% on an email that can draw a warning letter in Germany.
  • Check what your sales team actually sends today. A newsletter to bought company addresses falls under § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG, even where the recipient's imprint shows an info@ address.

For owners selling abroad:

  • Market entry starts with the channel question, not the translation. We build the country selection, the lawful channel matrix and the numbers behind them from EUR 6,500 net: Market entry.
  • Where the message needs settling before the channel does, positioning is the cheaper order, from EUR 3,900 net: Positioning.

For the Steuerberater or Anwalt sitting beside them:

  • § 20 UWG does not reach email. Quoting the EUR 300,000 at a client argues past the provision, and the private warning letter is the real exposure.
  • § 9 StBerG excludes every benefit, not only a commission. The unpaid recommendation stays available and is the only workable route.

Where we could be wrong

  • If a German court applies Article 6(2) Rome II to a foreign campaign and pulls German law back in, the route through British and Irish recipients closes, and the letter is the only channel left for every market.
  • If a court reads § 13 Abs. 4 Nr. 1 UWG onto a spam warning letter, cost reimbursement for a competitor falls away. The economic risk of a German campaign then drops sharply, and our channel choice rests on this point on a reading we could not back with case law.
  • If a sole trader slips through the British matching step as a company, that is a genuine breach of PECR reg. 22 against 57% of the UK business population. Matching against the Companies House register is a condition of sending rather than a recommendation.
  • If reply rates keep falling the way the LinkedIn connection note did, from 3.5% to 2.2% in twelve months, the arithmetic moves toward fewer and more expensive contacts. At 344 emails per meeting, every halving of the reply rate doubles the effort per meeting.

FAQ

May I cold-contact companies in Germany?

By post yes, by email no. § 7 Abs. 1 UWG puts no consent condition on an addressed advertising letter to a firm, the statute contains no opt-out register for post, and an express objection is binding. § 7 Abs. 2 Nr. 2 UWG requires the addressee's prior express consent for advertising email, with no exception for business recipients. A call to a firm sits between the two and requires a concrete fact about that recipient.

What does a warning letter over an advertising email cost?

The reimbursable lawyer's fees follow the Streitwert. In one Amtsgericht Düsseldorf case they came to EUR 403.50 on a Streitwert of EUR 3,500 for an email to a business recipient. Published Streitwerte for a single business email run from EUR 1,000 at LG Berlin to EUR 7,500 at LG Trier and LG Münster, and OLG Düsseldorf set EUR 50,000 for 2,000 emails. On top comes the cease-and-desist undertaking with a penalty, which § 13a Abs. 3 UWG caps at EUR 1,000 for marginal breaches by a party with fewer than 100 employees.

May my Steuerberater refer me?

Yes, unpaid. § 9 StBerG bars giving and taking a share of fees or any other benefit for passing on work, expressly including toward a third party of any kind. A recommendation with nothing in return is outside that. A commission, a discount, a gift or free work for the practice is inside it, and the ban applies whether the arrangement is open or concealed.

Does the German ban also cover emails sent to England?

On the wording of the relevant provisions, probably not, and it is undecided. § 3 Abs. 4 Nr. 3 DDG takes the permissibility of unsolicited commercial email out of the country-of-origin principle, so a sender does not carry home law abroad, and Article 6(1) Rome II designates the law of the affected market. For an email to a British limited company that would be PECR reg. 22, which does not reach corporations. We found no German decision on this fact pattern, Article 6(2) Rome II remains as the counter-argument, and the question belongs with a Rechtsanwalt für Wettbewerbsrecht before any first send.

Further reading

Sources

Nothing here is legal or tax advice. Your Steuerberater and Anwalt decide before anything binds.

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