Can/should I write to a persons personal email address when I am doing b2b outreach?

Technically you will be able to send an email to a personal email address BUT the short answer here is NO - you should not be sending cold unsolicited emails to a contacts personal email address. If you have some kind of prior relationship with the contact, for instance they got in touch with you using that email or you have previously communicated with them and they have responded positively via that email, then you can write to them; but in such a case you are no longer a 'cold emailer'. If you have received that contacts email address from a friend or at an event or similar, then sure you can write to the person because there is some level of implied intent and opt in from both parties. But if you have found the contacts personal email online or generated it somehow using email generating tools that guess a persons email address, we strongly recommend you do not write to the contact - especially not in any scaled/automated way.

Why? For 3 main reasons:

1. Personal emails are private to an individual and privacy regulations like GDPR (Europe), CAN-SPAM (USA), Electronic Messaging Act (Australia & New Zealand) and others protect an individuals privacy. Privacy regulations do not protect companies/businesses and representatives working at businesses the same way because businesses are by nature 'open for business' and there is a reasonable expectation that representatives can expect to hear from others who have a legitimate interest in reaching them, via their business email addresses.
2. A person is more likely to get upset and mark your message as spam if you write an unsolicited commercial based email to their personal email address than if you do the same whilst targeting their work/business email address where they are more likely (and expecting) to receive such mail and less likely to feel their personal space has been invaded by your contacting them. When someone you email marks your message as spam (an action that you will not be privy to) or your email is otherwise deemed to be 'unwanted' (e.g. it is deleted without being opened); these are signals to the contacts mailbox provider (e.g. Gmail, Outlook etc...) that messages from you are potentially poor quality/unwanted mail. This in turn affects your Sender Reputation Score (again this is not information that mailbox providers and email networks make available to you).
3. Mailbox providers e.g. Gmail, Apple Mail, Yahoo, Outlook, AOL etc... have increasingly sophisticated systems to help them protect their users (the people who you are trying to reach via email) and keep their mailboxes clear of 'unwanted email'. Their automated AI enabled systems are able to quickly determine the nature and type of your email and if you have a prior relationship with the individual or a valid reason for contacting them (e.g. you reference in your email that you met at an event). Their systems are more likely to automatically filter out your emails or put your emails into the users spam folder automatically when they detect you are sending unsolicited commercial email to a personal email account (this is less likely when sending to a persons business email addresses); thereby negatively impacting your Sender reputation and your ability to deliver emails more generally from your given account.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Using Hypadrive.ai, you (the Sender) are able to still include personal email addresses in your outreach programs/campaigns, however we do present you with a soft-warning against any personal/non-business email address we detect so that we can bring this consideration to your attention and encourage you to think twice about your strategy and decision to include a contacts personal email address in your outreach activities.

What about for recruitment outreach use cases?

Recruitment use cases are a bit different because recruitment opportunities relate to the private individual - not their role at the company they are currently working at/representing - and therefore it makes sense to write to the individual at their personal email address (or other personal contact channel) about such opportunities. Emails where you are offering a candidate a potential job opportunity that they otherwise would now know about are quite possibly something that any reasonable candidate would be open to knowing about; whether or not they are actually interested in moving at this point in time. People like to get a sense of what they are worth and to who. From an email providers perspective (e.g. Gmail/Outlook etc..; remember their job is to help their user receive wanted mail and to filter out 'unwanted mail'. It would be very difficult for an email provider to filter out job opportunities you may have to offer their users (your prospective candidates). Therefore it is more likely such emails of yours will reach the prospects inbox. Think about it this way; if a legitimate job opportunity was presented to you, would you be ok if it was not delivered to you/you never saw it in your inbox via the email they tried to reach you on? Most likely most of us would

You can still decide to write to a contact via their work email address but this could see you cross some invisible lines that could interfere with the potential candidate and their current employer. Employers are known to monitor emails of their staff and you soliciting new job opportunities that could disrupt the candidate and their current workplace could have unexpected and negative ramifications were the incumbent employer to find out (e.g. they could decide to replace the employee if they think the employee is a flight risk which would leave the employee/prospective candidate in a problematic and stressful situation - something you want to avoid being involved with). Either way, if you are conducting cold outreach communications via email with the objective of recruiting new team members or contractors, whatever email address you initiate communication with, you will want to quickly move the conversation over to their personal email account if they are interested and open to continuing a conversation with you (e.g. "please share your personal email and I we can communicate on details there" or "Hey, do you have a personal email? I would love to send you some info there instead". We recommend against continuing detailed recruitment conversations via a prospective candidates work email address; unless of course they own the business or domain of the email account you are communicating to them with (e.g. some people own their own emailing domain using their name).