Ask HN: What is the difference between cold emails and spam?

A cold email is something that takes a human at least an hour to write.

Spam is something that takes a factory less than a second to spit out.

Somewhere in-between, there’s a gray area. ‘Spam’ is in the eye of the beholder (nobody claims to produce spam) so where that is is a matter of taste.

For me, a cold email must have a human writer. That hour isn’t a strong boundary, but once you’re cold emailing ten different people an hour, I think you’re reaching spam country.

I also think there’s computer-produced emails that aren’t spam, but I can’t think of any I would call “cold email”.

Spam is unsolicited correspondence. Cold emails are unsolicited, therefore are spam.