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Compliance
Cold B2B outreach is regulated differently in different markets, and Wrenwire builds part of those rules into the process rather than relying on anyone’s memory.
This page covers the machinery. For what a specific market requires, see the market pages: Poland, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
Two layers, and they are independent
Almost every mistake in this area comes from collapsing two questions into one.
May you send the message? That is electronic communications and unfair competition law, and it differs sharply per market.
May you process the person’s data? That is the GDPR, and it applies across the EU regardless of which market you send into.
Satisfying one does not discharge the other. A campaign can have a clean consent position and still owe the recipient an information notice.
Target market and legal basis
Every campaign declares a target market. Germany, Austria and Switzerland carry additional requirements and get a pre-flight checklist before activation.
Before a campaign can start you declare the legal basis for contacting the segment:
- Existing consent: the people you are contacting have already agreed, through a confirmed opt-in.
- Existing customers: the narrower exception covering your own customers. Worth reading the market pages on this one, because it is narrower than it sounds and a free account does not qualify in any DACH market.
- Accepted risk: you knowingly accept the legal risk of contacting people who have neither consented nor are existing customers.
The declaration is stored with the campaign. That is the point of it: months later, what the decision rested on is still visible, and “accepted risk” reads as exactly what it was.
The pre-flight checklist
For campaigns aimed at Germany, Austria or Switzerland, activation is blocked until:
- the legal basis is declared;
- the sender’s legal details are complete, since they are injected into the footer of every email sent into that market;
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC are configured on the sending domain;
- the unsubscribe-link signing key is configured, so every outgoing email carries a working, verifiable unsubscribe link.
The sender details are resolved at send time, not when the message is generated, so changing your company address does not leave stale details inside series generated earlier.
A campaign may deliberately waive that footer. It is a separate decision confirmed in two steps, it is recorded, and it waives neither the legal basis nor the Article 14 notice below.
The Article 14 notice
Article 14 GDPR covers data you did not obtain from the person themselves, which is every prospect in this product. Publishing a notice on a website is not sufficient towards someone whose contact details you actually hold; it has to be delivered at the first communication.
Wrenwire injects that notice into the body of the first message when a sequence is saved. It is a permanent part of the stored text rather than a placeholder, because messages leave through external tools and by hand.
This has no market gate. It applies whether you are writing to Poland or to Switzerland.
The suppression list
The suppression list is the register of addresses that must never be contacted again. It is shared across the whole organization and every campaign in it.
Entries arrive automatically from:
- a click on the unsubscribe link,
- a “stop” reply,
- a hard bounce,
- an Article 21 GDPR objection,
- a manual entry or CSV import.
The filter runs automatically before every hand-off of prospects to sending. An address that opted out of one campaign stays suppressed in every campaign that follows, across the entire organization.
What the product does not decide
It does not judge whether your legal basis is sound in your specific case, and it does not send anything on its own. Sending happens through the tool you connect, after you approve.
Legal documents
The Terms of Service, Privacy Policy and Data Processing Agreement are published separately and updated independently of this documentation. Check the current versions on the site rather than relying on what is summarised here.