Hello lovely people!
I received an unsolicited e-mail (Not marketing) in a business e-mail address which is not available online anywhere and I never provided to the sender. I think that, knowing my name, the sender just guessed the syntax of the e-mail addresses of my company and reached me.

I was wondering, is this action legal in Switzerland? (Which should adhere to the GDPR regulation)

Thank you!

It's certainly a shady move that I would slap down outright, regardless of the law.

I will report anyway Just curious about the laws of the Country !

Call the police.

This sounds too heavy to me

Then what? It's more your business's fault than anything else.

Using an email address is not illegal under GDPR even without consent, as there are a few other allowed criteria.

There's a good article on the subject here:

https://www.cognitivelaw.co.uk/gdpr-...personal-data/

Interesting article, thanks for sharing. Still, it deals with business-to-business marketing while in my case the e-mail was personal and directed to me as an individual. Also, my doubt is not really linked to the consent, but to the fact that the email address has been guessed by retrieving the sintax of my company.

As far as I know there is no regulation which would make it illegal. Accordingly it is legal. See also Art. 1 Swiss Criminal Code.

Is it karen@iwanttoseeyourmanager.com?

Ahahah is way worse than a Karen

1. Of course it's legal. Why would you possibly think it might not be?
2. GDPR would have absolutely no bearing on this. Only if they are storing some data about you could it be in any way relevant.
3. Switzerland is not bound by GDPR, which is an EU regulation, anyway.

Depends where the email originated and which countries the company has dealings with AFAIK.

Switzerland's data protection law is largely derived from the European GDPR, not surprisingly in view of the volume of exchanges which take place with the EU. That said, I don't see what GDPR or Swiss data protection laws would have to say on this. I'm sure this happens hundreds of times each day, both in Switzerland and the rest of the world. What's wrong with guessing e-mail addresses? Mind you trying to reach John.Smith@bigmultinational.com might have the mail routing system scratch its head a little.

There are tools to make email guessing much easier. That is, without sending an email, you can check the address validity. Example:

https://verifalia.com/validate-email

However, not all mail services are configured to respond usefully to this sort of "is this address valid in your domain" type enquiry. I've just checked a few sample email addresses with a local provider and it appears to work there.
(for the technically minded: SMTP VRFY and similar)

Any decent provider will have disabled SMTP VRFY on external mail gateways, it serves no useful purpose but acts as a weakness for email guessing and therefore spam sending.