[flamadiddle]

The author is doing his article a disservice by calling this cold email. He just sent a few one-off emails to strangers. That's quite different than the BDR team at Startup Du Jour scraping LinkedIn and blasting out an enless stream of "hope this message finds you well" slop.

I'd wager that the majority of us do not differentiate between cold email and spam, especially in the AI era.

[inigyou]

No, it isn't different. What you're describing is a cold email that some people might not feel is spam, and one that everyone agrees is spam.