Answers
The questions sales teams ask, answered properly.
Whether you may legally email or ring a business in Australia, the UK or the US, where the companies on a prospect list actually come from in each of those markets, and what a CRM means when it says it finds leads for you. 13 questions, each answered in the first paragraph.
The law pages are general information, not legal advice.
13 questions
Every answer, in one place
Grouped the way the questions arrive. The short answer is on this page; the page behind it carries the sources, the edge cases and the worked examples.
What you may legally send, and say
The rules on cold email and cold calling in the three markets our customers sell into, each checked against the regulator rather than against other blogs.
These pages explain the law and link the primary sources. General information, not legal advice.
Is cold email legal in Australia?
Yes, when the Spam Act 2003 conditions are met. You need consent, which for a business can often be inferred from a work address published conspicuously and without a note refusing such messages, you must identify yourself accurately, and you must include a working unsubscribe. Australia has no CAN-SPAM, so American advice does not apply.
Read the full answerIs cold email legal in the UK?
Usually yes to a company, usually no to a sole trader. UK law splits recipients into corporate and individual subscribers, and a sole trader or partnership counts as an individual, which is the distinction almost everything else turns on.
Read the full answerCan you cold call a business in Australia?
Yes. Business numbers are not eligible for the Do Not Call Register, so a genuine business line is not screened by it. Mobiles are where it gets involved, because a number can be registered by the person who carries it.
Read the full answerCan you cold call a business in the UK?
Only after screening the number, and against two registers rather than one. There is no business exemption in the UK: companies register on the CTPS and sole traders on the TPS, and a business calling list has to be checked against both.
Read the full answerCan you cold call a business in New Zealand?
Yes, and there is no government register to screen the number against, because New Zealand does not have one. The only suppression list is an industry service you pay to access. What does bite is the Privacy Act, and from 1 May 2026 it asks where you got the number.
Read the full answerIs cold email legal in the Philippines?
Yes, and privacy law governs it because there is no anti-spam law at all. The Data Privacy Act 2012 wants a lawful basis before you hold the details, gives private-sector work addresses no carve-out, and is the only law in this cluster that carries prison terms.
Read the full answerIs cold email legal in Canada?
Only on one narrow route. CASL wants consent before you send, and the business-to-business exemption everybody cites requires the two organisations to already have a relationship, which a cold email does not have. What is left is implied consent from a conspicuously published address, on three conditions.
Read the full answerIs cold email legal in Singapore?
Yes, and no permission is needed before you send. The ADV labelling rule catches only messages sent in bulk, which the Spam Control Act puts at more than 100 similar messages in 24 hours, 1,000 in 30 days or 10,000 in a year. A normal sequence is under all three, so the rule most advice quotes does not reach it.
Read the full answerHow do cold email laws differ between Australia, the UK and the US?
They disagree on the one question that matters: whether you need permission before you send. Australia says yes and lets you infer it for business contacts, the UK says it depends on whether the recipient is a company or a person, and the US does not require permission up front at all.
Read the full answerBuilding a prospect list
Where the companies actually come from in each country, starting from the public registers, and what each register cannot tell you.
How do you build a B2B prospect list in Australia?
Australia has a free, complete public register of every business including sole traders, and no industry classification in it that you can search on. So the register verifies a company you already have rather than finding one, and that single gap decides the whole method.
Read the full answerHow do you build a B2B prospect list in the UK?
Start with Companies House, which most guides skip. It is a complete, machine-readable register of every incorporated business in the UK, searchable by industry code, location and age, and it is free.
Read the full answerHow do you build a B2B prospect list in the USA?
There is no national business register to start from. Registration is a state function, so there are fifty of them, and none is built for finding customers. That absence is why American prospecting begins with a bought company layer rather than a public one.
Read the full answerChoosing a CRM
What the category claims versus what the products do when you open them.
How these pages are written
Three rules, and the third one costs us sales
Most results for these questions are either a US blog applying the wrong country's law or an article written to sell a consultation. These pages are neither, and the way they are written is the reason to trust them.
- Every legal claim traces to the regulator, not to another blog. The Australian pages cite ACMA and the Spam Act itself; the UK pages cite the ICO and PECR. Each page names the date it was last checked against those sources.
- A figure we could not verify is left out rather than rounded. An earlier draft repeated a widely quoted Australian threshold that does not exist in the Act, and a widely repeated claim about UK register renewals that no regulator states. Both were removed. A missing number is better than a confident wrong one.
- We do not claim Empiraa Signal makes you compliant. Signal sends from your own inbox, stops on a reply, and adds and hosts the unsubscribe. So it covers sender identification and the opt-out, and it does not cover the condition most breaches actually turn on, which is whether there was consent to send at all. Saying so loses us a line in a sales deck and keeps the page worth citing.
If a page here is wrong, or a regulator has moved since the date on it, tell us at team@empiraa.com and we will correct it and say that we did. Two of these pages already carry a correction note for exactly that reason.
Once you know the rules
The part the reading does not do for you
Knowing what you may send is the easy half. Signal is where the list gets built, the sequence goes out from your own inbox with the unsubscribe attached, and the reply lands on the deal.
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