Cold Email
A cold email is an email that has been sent to someone without any prior knowledge of the sender. Often, cold emails are used as an initial outreach tool.
While cold emails are sometimes perfectly acceptable, a huge issue is that they are often seen as spam.
To avoid this scenario, senders should take great care to personalise the content of the email, rather than sending mass emails (including those whereby only the name of the sender is changed). That's because such emails do not look genuine and so can be very ineffective in their aims which is usually to sell a product or a service.
Senders of cold emails should also be careful that their campaigns are not in violation of the Can-Spam Act, which is another reason why mass email sending should be avoided.
Example
An example of a cold email sent to EcoSend content writer Rachael.
Not only was this message flagged by spam by the mail server, but is quite obviously a template as the language flow doesn't seem natural.
Also, the sender was not known to Rachael which meant this campaign was sent without permission. Rachael's email was found through an email scraper tool, which again comes across as spam.
Had this email been crafted from scratch, it may have bypassed the spam filters, and also appeared genuine.