Cold-email compliance checks

Check each address on an outreach list against its jurisdiction’s cold-email rule before you send.

Cold-email rules differ by country. In the United States you can email anyone with a working opt-out. In Germany you need prior consent, even for business addresses. This guide shows how to sort an outreach list into addresses you can email, addresses that need consent first, and addresses to review.

How Finowl decides

1. Domain. A country-code domain like .de or .co.uk, or a single-country mailbox provider like web.de, points to a country. Vanity domains such as .io and .co are ignored.
2. Mail servers. Third-party mail hosts in a country add evidence.
3. Website. The homepage’s declared language and its tel: links add evidence. Finowl ignores redirects to locale paths like /in, because those follow the visitor’s location rather than the owner’s.

One country backed by two independent checks is confident. Thinner evidence, or several candidate countries, is medium, and the strictest candidate’s rule applies. With no evidence the result is unknown and the consent_required default applies.

Example

import os
import time
import requests

session = requests.Session()
session.headers["Authorization"] = f"Bearer {os.environ['FINOWL_API_KEY']}"

SEND = {"allowed", "allowed_by_policy", "allowed_with_conditions", "safe_to_send"}


def verdict(email):
    for _ in range(5):
        response = session.post(
            "https://api.finowl.co/v1/compliance/email",
            json={"email": email},
            timeout=40,
        )
        response.raise_for_status()
        result = response.json()
        if not result.get("checking"):
            return result
        time.sleep(3)  # provisional: re-checks are free
    return result


def triage(emails):
    send, consent, review = [], [], []
    for email in emails:
        result = verdict(email)
        code = result["recommendation_code"]
        if code in SEND:
            send.append(email)
        elif code in ("consent_required", "prohibited"):
            consent.append(email)
        else:  # exception_required, case_by_case and any new code
            review.append((email, result["recommendation"]))
    return send, consent, review

Showing the result

confidence	What to show
confident	The country and its rule.
medium	The rule, noting it is the strictest of the countries in jurisdictions_applicable.
unknown	No country. Show recommendation and main_restrictions as general guidance.

message is a sentence you can show as is.

Finowl’s rules are guidance compiled from public sources, not legal advice. allowed_with_conditions still means you must meet the conditions in main_restrictions, such as identifying yourself and honouring opt-outs.