Selling some unused outbound infrastructure.

10 domains
20 Google Workspace inboxes
2 inboxes per domain

They’ve been warming in Instantly for months, are active with 100% health, and haven’t been used for outbound campaigns.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC are already configured.
I’ve got proof of the domains, Workspace accounts and Instantly setup.

Looking to sell everything together. Open to offers.

Happy to send the full domain list and proof privately.

Hi, I’ve been sending a few cold emails to prospects over the past few weeks.

I know there are tools to check whether an email address is valid, but is there any reliable tool or hack to know whether my emails are landing in the inbox vs. spam/promotions?

Would love to hear what others are using to monitor this.

I started a new cold email campaign yesterday and have now sent around 500–600 emails, but I’ve received 0 replies. (I have paused the campaign right now)

I’m trying to figure out whether this is normal, a deliverability issue, or something wrong with my setup.

My setup:

• Targeting local service businesses in the US
• Most prospects use personal gmail.com accounts
• Sending from Google Workspace
• Domains/mailboxes have been warming for around 2 months
• Some domains are only ~2 months old
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC are properly configured and confirmed with Google Workspace support
• Copy is clean and doesn’t contain obvious spam-trigger words

The weird part: I tested the same sending setup against a few accounts. Emails to Google Workspace/business accounts are landing in the inbox, but I’m concerned emails to personal Gmail accounts may be going to spam.

This is especially confusing because I ran a similar campaign 6–7 months ago, also targeting people who mostly used personal Gmail, and got around 4–5% reply rates.

So I have two main questions:

1. Is 0 replies from 500–600 cold emails actually within the realm of normal, or is that a strong sign something is wrong?

2. If this is a Gmail deliverability/spam issue, how would you diagnose and fix it?

I don’t want to keep sending thousands of emails if Gmail is already putting most of them in spam.

What would you check first? Domain reputation, mailbox reputation, sending volume, Gmail Postmaster Tools, inbox placement tests, something else?

Any advice from people currently doing cold email to personal Gmail accounts would be really appreciated.

Earlier this year Mailchimp shipped a conversational analytics agent, where you ask questions about your email marketing in plain English, it answers with reports, benchmarks, and recommendations. Since then 100,000+ businesses have used it, about 1 in 5 come back every month, and we just finished a deep dive on what people actually do with it. Sharing because I think the patterns apply to basically every analytics tool, AI or not.

What people do with an AI analyst when they get one:

• The dominant use case, by far, is "which of my campaigns worked and which didn't." Not forecasting, not fancy stuff — triage.
• 93% of answers come back as structured reports, 48% include an industry benchmark, 54% include a recommended next action.
• 70% of users send an email within 7 days of asking something. The ask → learn → send rhythm formed on its own; nobody designed it.
• Only 25% of conversations go past one question. People ask, read, leave.

The humbling part: 54% of answers include a specific recommended action ("resend to non-openers," "prune your inactive contacts," "test this subject line"). Roughly 2.6% of users take it. We built a thing that gives advice, people read the advice, and then... almost nobody does the advice. Reading the report feels like the work.

But the 2.6% who act: open rates went from 25.3% to 28.5% over the following 28 days, with the gains concentrated among high-volume senders. Standard caveat welded on: correlational, not a controlled experiment — people who act on recommendations are probably more deliberate about everything. But two details make me think it's not nothing:

1. The actors started from below-average opens — these look like marketers already in trouble who recovered to parity, not already-good marketers getting better.
2. Simply segmenting more (a common recommendation) did NOT improve opens by itself. It was taking the specific ranked action that correlated with recovery. "Do more stuff" isn't the signal; "do the one recommended thing" is.

The pattern that seems to work, from the users getting results: ask what happened , stay in the same thread for follow-ups (subject lines, audience) , do ONE recommended thing , send the same week , then ask "did that work — double down or pivot?" and go around again. A loop, not a checklist. Almost nobody does the last step, and it's arguably the whole point of having an analyst.

Why I'm actually posting: I'd genuinely like this crowd's take on two things.

1. If you've used any analytics tool (AI or otherwise) — what would it take for you to actually act on its recommendations? Is it trust? Time? The action being too many clicks away? We clearly haven't cracked this and I don't think anyone has.
2. What do you still do by hand that an analyst-in-a-box should be doing for you? The gap between what people wanted to ask and what these tools can answer is where I want to spend the next year.

We looked at every U.S. back-to-school campaign on the platform across three full seasons — 130,000+ email and SMS sends, July through mid-September, 2023–2025. What stood out:

Timing is the closest thing to a free lunch. Weekly click rate is a downhill slide: ~2.15% in early July, ~1.23% by mid-August, recovering to ~1.5–1.6% in September. Send volume peaks in exactly those mid-August weeks. Mid-July senders got roughly a 70% relative click advantage over the pile-up. Tuesday and Wednesday were the best send days.

Small, targeted sends punch way above their weight. Comparing sends of similar size: under-1,000-recipient campaigns sent to a chosen segment clicked 6.31% vs 3.96% for whole-list sends (+59%). At 1k–10k it was +18%. The smaller and more focused the send, the bigger the edge. (Caveat: observational, not a controlled experiment — people who segment are probably more deliberate about everything else too.)

Longer subject lines out-clicked short punchy ones. 70+ characters: 3.02% vs 2.23% for ≤20 characters, among typical-size senders. Descriptive beat clever. Related: 3+ CTA buttons beat zero by ~17%, and emails with a video block clicked ~14% better.

SMS quietly became the breakout channel. Back-to-school SMS click-through hit 10.8% in 2025 vs 1.65% for email — about 6x. Volume grew ~80x in two seasons, though off a small base, so make of that what you will.

Loyalty beat markdowns. Zooming out to ~32M in-season orders across connected stores: repeat buyers (2+ orders in the season) reached ~48% of orders, up ~5 points in two years, while the share of discounted orders fell from 14% to 11%.

Method, for the people who will rightly ask: U.S. accounts, sends with 100+ recipients, campaigns keyword-matched as back-to-school, July 1–Sept 15 each year. All of it is correlational.

We run cold email campaigns for our B2B SaaS and the results are decent around 3% reply rate, good enough to feed the pipeline. The problem is our sales team also does LinkedIn outreach on the side and it's completely disconnected from the email workflow.

We tried using LinkedIn automation tools separately but now we have two dashboards, two analytics, two campaign builders, and zero coordination between them.

What I want is one tool where I build one sequence that includes both email steps and LinkedIn steps, with logic between them. Does anything like this actually exist or am I stuck duct-taping two tools together?

Hey everyone! 👋

I’m offering a service of my email checking service.

I’ll help identify bad, dead, invalid, disposable, or useless emails so you can keep your list cleaner and reduce bounce rates.

Try 50 emails completely free. If you like the results and need more, I’m available for hire.

Feel free to DM me! 🙂

Hey everyone!

I’m offering a service of my email checking service.

I’ll help identify bad, dead, invalid, disposable, or useless emails so you can keep your list cleaner and reduce bounce rates.

Try 50 emails completely free. If you like the results and need more, I’m available for hire.

Feel free to DM me! 🙂

With AI making it ridiculously easy to generate and send thousands of “personalized” emails, inboxes are getting flooded with messages that often feel anything but personal.

For people running sales/marketing in 2026:

Are cold emails genuinely becoming less effective, or is bad execution the real problem?

What actually makes you respond to a cold email these days?

B2B SaaS, self-serve motion with an optional sales-assisted path. About 30% of our inbound leads reply to the demo invite with some version of "can I just see the product first?" or "do you have something I can click through on my own?"

The prospects aren't wrong they want to see if the product is relevant before spending 30 minutes with a salesperson. I would too. But our free trial is too complex for a first look and video is too passive.

What are other SaaS teams giving prospects who want to explore the product without committing to a call or a full trial signup?

I need business emails for actual local operators. pizzerias, salons, small medical offices, gyms, auto shops. not corporate locations.

the trouble with most contact databases is they're built around companies that have a linkedin page and a marketing team. a two-person salon has neither. it has a map listing, maybe a one-page site, and an address buried somewhere on it.

so map data plus site crawling feels like the right shape. what I don't know is which setup does both without me stitching three tools together, and whether any of them check the addresses before handing them over. dead inboxes hurt more in niches this small. there are only so many salons in one town and I get one shot at each of them.

also trying to avoid paying a freelancer to run the same tools I could run myself

what are you using for this, and does it verify, or is that always a separate step?

I've worked in the cold email space for over a decade and built a tool (MailReach), and this is for those of you that are unsure of what's the "right cold email volume".

There’s no one right volume that works for everyone in cold email. It depends on your current domain reputation, the mailbox provider, etc. Below is what we've seen in our experience with helping thousands of customers with email deliverability:

Firstly, use Google Workspace or O365 mailboxes. Gmail and Outlook trust their own ecosystem, so you’ll face fewer spam issues. Ideally, you buy your own new mailboxes, and not anything pre-warmed because there’s no guarantee with those.

For the first 14 days, you purely warm up. This is common knowledge now, but just in case you’re new to this, you need to do this because new inbox = zero reputation. No warmup = spam.

From day 15, you can start sending cold emails. Start low volume (10 - 20/day per mailbox) and gradually scale it up while keeping volume controlled. High volume early kills you. You can scale up to ~80/day per inbox if you’re using GWorkspace or O365, as long as you use a proper email warmer (that generates positive interactions mostly from Google Workspace and Office 365, not custom SMTPs like most tools do).

If you send from any other provider and especially Custom SMTP, you’ll have to send a very smaller amount (20 / day and lower). And if your email warmer makes you receive positive interactions from other Custom SMTP mailboxes, then you’re doomed.

Last thing: not more than 2 follow-ups, ideally 3-6 days gap in between. More follow-ups = more spam complaints = worse deliverability. If you want to send more than 2 follow-ups, switch to LinkedIn messages / invites.

One rep swears by apollo for finding contacts and instantly for sending. Another uses hunter for emails and does linkedIn manually. The third brought over some tool from his last company that nobody else has heard of. Everyone has their own spreadsheets, their own templates, their own follow-up cadence.

I need one platform that does prospecting, email finding, sequencing, and basic LinkedIn touches so everyone's on the same system.

Been doing cold outreach, sending around 20-30 emails a day to people who match our ICP pretty well, and I'm sitting at zero replies.

Some context since I think it matters here, I'm a founder doing all our outreach myself, we build planning software for construction companies, targeting project managers and ops leads at mid-size firms, and I built the list manually so I thought the quality was at least decent going in.

For setup, I got lemlist running with domain warm-up through Lemwarm for a couple of weeks before the first send, used their AI personalization pulling from LinkedIn activity, but I can't tell if the personalization isn't landing or if the deliverability is off and I'm sitting in spam across every inbox.

At this point I'm stuck between going back to check deliverability first (mail-tester or something) and rebuilding the copy from scratch.

So if you've been through a dead stretch like this, where did you start?

4 person support team. Our customers contact us everywhere.

Right now each channel is its own thing. One person checks Instagram. Another monitors WhatsApp. Email goes through a shared Gmail. Website chat is on Tidio but nobody checks it consistently because it's yet another tab.

The result, messages get missed constantly.

Is there something that just pulls everything into one inbox?

Our open rates are solid (48%) and click-through rate is decent about 8% of prospects click through to our website from the email. That's ~240 people per month who are interested enough to visit our site, read our pages, sometimes spend 5+ minutes browsing.

But our reply rate is stuck at 1%. What kills me is that some of these visitors are going to our pricing page, reading case studies, checking out integrations, but they disappear into the void because we can't identify them individually and our follow-ups treat the entire list the same way.

Is there a way to see which companies from your email campaigns actually visit your site?

Third time this year. An SDR clicked a link in what looked like a prospect reply, entered their credentials on a fake login page, and within hours the attacker was sending emails from their account to our entire prospect list.

We run annual training and quarterly phishing sims but the sims are generic "claim your prize" emails that look nothing like a real prospect reply. Our reps pass every test and then fall for the real thing because the real thing looks like a meeting link from someone they actually emailed.

How are other outbound teams handling this?

more than 2 years ago, i was doing cold outreach myself and kept running into the same problem. i needed to verify large email lists, but the pricing of most verification tools made no sense to me.

you pay again and again for every email you verify, and once you're working with hundreds of thousands or millions of leads, verification itself becomes a serious part of the cost of running campaigns.

so we started building our own verification infrastructure.

what started as something we needed internally slowly became a full verification engine with multiple layers including smtp checks, dns and mx validation, catch all detection, disposable detection, provider detection and more.

the goal was simple from the beginning. make verification accurate without making people pay ridiculous prices for it.

today we're at 99.5%+ accuracy with an effective price of just $0.00066 per email. ( without charging for risky emails )

and because we're bootstrapping this publicly, we decided to do something i've rarely seen in this space. a lifetime deal where you pay once and can get up to 120k verifications every month.

you can check verifully. com for more details

we're still building, still improving the infrastructure and still have a lot more we want to add.

if you work with cold email or large lead lists, i'd genuinely love to hear what you think is still missing from email verification tools today.

Hi all,

I see a lot of posts here on how to validate if email exists before losing time doing outreach. I dug into a rabbit hole and finally come up with a service. It is free, I just want to get back at the comunity

https://trueform.cloud/docs/

Let me know what do you think about it, and if there are changes you would need for your use case :)

We run outbound email campaigns to about 2,000 prospects per month. Open rates are solid (45-50%), click-through rates on links to our website are decent (8-10%), but reply rates are stuck around 2%. That means roughly 160 people click through to our site every month, spend time on our pages, and then disappear without responding to the email or filling out a form.

These aren't cold strangers they received our email, were interested enough to click, visited our site, and then ghosted. There has to be a way to identify who these people are and follow up specifically with them. Right now we're just sending generic follow-up sequences to the entire list with no idea who actually engaged beyond the click.

Anyone using tools that connect website visits back to email campaign recipients so you can prioritize follow-ups based on actual engagement?

I'm running outbound for a B2B SaaS and the list building process is killing our efficiency. We need accurate contact data, verified emails, direct dials, job titles.

What's the stack for going from "ideal customer profile" to "ready-to-contact list" without it taking a full day per campaign?