Who sent it
ColdProof, an outbound sales service; ColdProof is the legal name the email’s footer gives. The email was written by our system from public sources and signed by Michael Chen, who reads every reply. Write to [email protected] and a person answers within a business day.
Why you
You or your company published something that matches a problem our service addresses: a post on Hacker News or Stack Exchange, a job post on YC’s job board or on a public job board (Ashby, Greenhouse, Lever, Workable), or a page on your company’s site. The email cites that public fact.
We write only to a named person’s business address that was published on a public page, and we keep that page’s link as the record of where the address came from. We never guess an address, buy a list, test an address against a mail server, or log in anywhere to read a page. We do not read LinkedIn or X, and a post on Reddit or GitHub never leads to an email.
We write only to people in the United States and the United Kingdom, and never to a sole trader in the UK.
The legal basis
- In the United States, the CAN-SPAM Act allows a business email without prior consent when it is truthful, says who sent it and offers a way to opt out, which must be honoured within 10 business days. We honour it within two days.
- In the United Kingdom, PECR allows business email to a company or other corporate body without prior consent; sole traders count as individuals, so we do not write to them. UK GDPR still covers your name and address. Our basis is legitimate interests (Article 6(1)(f)): Recital 47 says direct marketing may be one. We write down the test that weighs our interest against yours before a campaign starts.
- You have the right to object at any time. Saying stop is enough; see below.
What we keep, and for how long
- Your name, your business address and the link to the page that published it.
- About a public post of yours: your handle, the link to your public profile, the words we quoted, the post’s link and date, and the text we checked them against.
- About you: your professional context only, your role, your company and your public professional pages. Nothing about your private life, nothing inferred about you, nothing bought.
- If we never write to you, all of it is deleted after 90 days.
- If we wrote to you, the email, its sources and your reply stay with the record of that email, so a stop or a dispute can be answered from it. No end date is set for this record yet.
- We do not sell it. When we write for a customer, that customer approves the email, so sees it, before it is sent. Our do-not-contact list is never exported to a customer or a vendor.
- Ask us to delete what we hold about you and we do it within one month, keeping only your address on the do-not-contact list so that no later email reaches you.
How to stop
Reply “stop”. It is honoured within two days. Your address goes on our do-not-contact list, which never expires, and no later campaign, ours or one we run for a customer, can email it again. If you write that nobody at your company should be contacted, we stop for every address at your company’s email domain.
For the rest of what this site records, see privacy.