Six questions to ask before anyone sends email in your name

A restaurant owner recently sent us six questions before deciding whether to let Leadralia email other businesses on their behalf. They were exactly the right questions. Anyone who offers to send email in your name should be able to answer every one of them plainly, and in writing.

So here are the answers we gave, for anyone weighing the same decision. They describe how Leadralia works today, in particular our "We do it for you" orders, where you approve the email and we do the searching and the sending. Where the honest answer is "it depends", we say so.

This article is general information, not legal advice. The campaign stays yours: it goes out in your name, with the text you approved, and you remain responsible for it. For the legal background, read our guide to B2B cold email under GDPR.

1. Are the emails compliant with the GDPR and the email marketing rules?

Two sets of rules apply, and it helps to keep them apart. The GDPR decides whether business contact data may be collected and used at all. The national email marketing rules decide whether a particular message may be sent. The second set differs per country, which is why question 2 gets its own section.

On the GDPR side, this is what Leadralia does:

• Only public business data. Records come from what businesses publish about themselves: their public listing on the map and their own website. No bought lists, no data brokers, and we never sell the data on.
• A stated legal basis. Business lead data is processed on the basis of legitimate interest, as our privacy statement explains, and anyone can object at any time.
• Clear roles. For your campaign you are the controller and Leadralia is your processor, working on your instructions. A data processing agreement is available to business customers on request.
• Transparency in the mail itself. Every campaign email says that the business details come from public online sources, and tells the reader how to say no.
• Rights that work without us. Anyone can ask for access, correction, erasure or objection on our data rights page, without an account.
• Data kept in the EU where possible. Our database is hosted in the EU and campaign email goes out through an EU region.

What no tool can do is judge your campaign for you. Whether it is lawful also depends on what you offer, to whom and in which country. Our terms say it plainly: you need a valid legal basis for the businesses you contact, and you honour every opt-out.

In short. Leadralia makes sure the tooling does its part: the source, the notice, the way out and the data rights. The message, the audience and the responsibility for both stay with you.

2. May you write to businesses that never gave consent?

It depends on the country, and we will not pretend otherwise. Our GDPR guide covers the rules country by country. Three examples from it:

• Germany requires prior consent for email advertising, business recipients included.
• The Netherlands takes consent as the starting point for messages to companies too, with narrow exceptions.
• France accepts email to a professional address when the message relates to the recipient's work and every mail offers a free way to object.

A "We do it for you" order applies a rule per country before anything is sent:

• Germany is refused. The order form stops before payment. It does the same for other countries where the law asks for prior consent, or for a step we do not offer yet, and for any country we have not reviewed.
• In the Netherlands and Belgium an order writes only to the general address a company publishes, such as info@ or contact@. Never to an address with a person's name in it, and never to a private mailbox such as Gmail or Hotmail.

These rules keep an order to the most careful part of the audience. They are a careful default, not a legal opinion on your campaign. If you are unsure whether your situation fits the rules, and in the Netherlands that is a fair question to ask, check with a lawyer in that country before you order.

If you run a campaign yourself in the app instead, you choose the countries and the addresses, and the same responsibility sits with you.

3. Where do the email addresses come from, and are they current?

From the businesses themselves. The search finds businesses of the type and in the area you chose on the public map, with their name, address, phone number and website. The email address is the one the business publishes on its own website, usually on the home page or the contact page. We never guess an address from a name pattern, and we never buy one.

The list is not an old file. An order starts its search after you pay, and the websites are read at that moment.

Before anything is sent, every address passes a series of checks:

• Placeholders are removed. Addresses a website template never filled in, such as example@, are nobody's inbox.
• Addresses that belong to someone else are left out. The support address of a website builder or a hosting company, a web designer's address, or a mailbox nobody reads, such as noreply@ or webmaster@. We only use an address on the business's own domain, or a mailbox the business clearly uses itself.
• The domain must accept email. Right before each send, we check that the address is well formed and that its domain has a mail server. A domain without one is skipped and never counts as a sent email.
• Earlier failures count. An address that bounced as undeliverable before is blocked and is not written again.
• Objections count everywhere. An address that opted out or asked to be erased is skipped, whoever the sender is.

To be honest about the limits: no check can prove that a mailbox is read, or that it will still exist tomorrow. That is why a hard bounce is recorded straight away, and a dead address stays blocked from then on.

4. How do you keep the emails out of spam folders and off blacklists?

Nobody can promise that an email never lands in a spam folder, and anyone who does is guessing. What we can do is avoid the things that get mail filtered and senders listed:

• An authenticated sender. Every sending address we host has SPF and DKIM records, the checks mail providers use to confirm that a message really comes from the domain it claims, and our sending domains publish a DMARC policy.
• Spread over several domains. Customers are divided over several sending domains, so no single domain carries everyone's mail.
• A human pace. An order sends on working days during office hours in your recipients' time zone (Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 17:00, unless you choose otherwise). A daily limit per sender spreads a package over several working days, and a limit per hour applies to each sending domain.
• Clean lists. The checks from question 3 keep dead and wrong addresses out. Each address is written once per campaign, even when several listings share it, and an order leaves chains out: one company domain behind several branches is a head office, and writing to it once per branch would be spam.
• A coach for your email. Before you pay, the order form checks your email and warns you about what filters dislike: a subject in capital letters, more than one link, words like "guaranteed" or "risk free", a text that runs long.
• An automatic brake. Our system watches every sending domain. When bounces or spam complaints rise above a safe level, sending pauses until someone has looked into it. A hosted address stops at its very first spam complaint.
• Plain, personal mail. The footer is two short lines of text without a link, so the mail reads like one business writing to another, not like a newsletter. Mail to Belgium also carries an unsubscribe link, which the rules there ask for.

5. Whose name and address does the recipient see?

In a "We do it for you" order, the mail goes out from a sending address we set up for your business:

• The sender name is your business name, taken from your account. That is what the recipient sees in their inbox.
• The address is yours alone, on a sending domain we manage. It is not your own domain and not your everyday mailbox, and no other customer sends from it.
• Replies come to you. They go to the email address of your Leadralia account, and by default they also appear on the Replies page in Leadralia.
• The opt-out address is ours. The "no" address at the bottom of the mail is on a Leadralia domain, so an objection always reaches us and is processed, even when you are away.

Why a separate sending domain? It keeps your own domain out of it. The reputation of the address you use for quotes and invoices is not at stake, and nothing has to be set up on your side.

Prefer your own address? When you run campaigns yourself in the app, you can send from your own mailbox instead: Gmail or Outlook, any SMTP mailbox, or your own domain.

6. When someone says no, are they removed automatically?

Yes. Every campaign email ends with a short line in the language of the mail: did this reach you by mistake, or is it unwelcome? Send "no" to the address below and you will receive nothing more. That address is unique to the recipient.

• Whatever reaches that address counts as a no. No form, no login, no reason needed. Automatic answers such as out-of-office messages are ignored.
• It is processed automatically. The address is removed from the lead data and blocked, for you and for every other sender on Leadralia. The same happens to the address the "no" came from, if that is a different one.
• Belgium also gets a link. Mail to Belgian businesses carries an unsubscribe link as well. It opens a page where one click confirms, and no further mail from that sender follows.
• A spam complaint counts too. Someone who marks a mail from a hosted address as spam is blocked for every sender on the platform.
• The data rights page works at any time. A business can also object or ask for erasure on our data rights page. After a confirmation by email it applies across the whole platform.

One thing is not automatic: an ordinary reply to you that says "please take us off your list" reaches you like any other reply. An order writes to each address only once and sends no automatic follow-up, so nothing more goes out from that order anyway. The request is still yours to respect in anything you send later.

The six answers at a glance

Bottom line

These six questions are a good test for anyone who offers to send email for you, us included. Ask them in writing, and expect answers you can check.

Ours come down to this: only what businesses publish themselves, addresses checked before sending, a human pace from an authenticated address in your name, an automatic stop when something goes wrong, and a "no" that is processed the first time. What stays with you is what no tool can take over: an offer that matters to the businesses you write to, and the judgement that your campaign fits the rules of the country you send to.

To see what an order looks like before you pay anything, create a free account. Nothing is searched or sent before you pay, and only the email you approved goes out.