Emailing a publicly available address posted by the same person
<p>I understand that emailing a person without consent is illegal under GDPR.</p>
<p>But is it okay to email someone if the person has made the mail address public? For example if a university professor posted his/her email on the university website (which is publicly open without any login requirement). Is it okay to send them an email?</p>

<p>The GDPR doesn't generally distinguish public from non-public personal data.</p>
<p>If you have a good reason to contact the professor, do send them an email. GDPR does not prevent this. If you're sending this email for “purely personal or household purposes”, then GDPR doesn't apply anyway.</p>
<p>There are rules in the ePrivacy Directive against unsolicited emails, but these specifically relate to emails for <em>direct marketing purposes</em>. A company is not allowed to send out spam marketing, regardless of whether they obtained the email address from a public data source. Companies can send email marketing to their own existing customers, or to people who have given consent. Consent is defined in a fairly restrictive way (as a specific, informed, freely given, and unambiguous indication of the data subject's wishes), so that mere publication of an email address cannot be interpreted as consent to receive marketing from a particular company.</p>

<p>Emailing a person without consent absolutely isn't illegal under GDPR.</p>
<p>GDPR applies to companies, not generally to individuals.</p>
<p>Furthermore, GDPR wouldn't prevent a commercial entity from emailing someone without consent if there was a legitimate, non-marketing reason for it. To take your example, if I were designing a new widget that used plasma recombobulators for ACME INC I'd be perfectly allowed to email Proffessor Smith (an expert in that field) to ask if he had any useful advice on how to keep the flux capacitor cooled.</p>
<p>What you can't do is spam people with marketing without consent.</p>

gdpr