Three SDRs on my team refused to email any European prospect for six months after our legal counsel sent a one-paragraph memo saying "be careful with GDPR." No follow-up, no context, just vibes-based paralysis. Meanwhile, our competitors were booking meetings with the same contacts. Then I ran an audit of 500 cold email campaigns from EU-targeting teams across industries. Half were under-complying in ways that created real liability. The other half had locked down their pipeline out of myths that do not hold up to the actual regulation text. Here is what the law actually says — written for reps, not lawyers. Myth 1: Cold emailing EU prospects is illegal under GDPR It is not. GDPR Recital 47 explicitly names direct marketing as a "legitimate interest" — meaning it can be a valid legal basis for processing someone's contact data without their prior consent. The confusion comes from mixing up GDPR with ePrivacy rules. GDPR is the data protection framework.…