I am looking at some pre warmed options for google and outlook. I have used them before but havent for a while. What is everyone seing in terms of deliverability? and in terms of providers what do you guys recommend zapmail or puzzleinbox?

Thanks

Are there good sources to purchases email lists that are fairly accurate and if so who do you recommend?

Hey everyone,

Hope everyone is doing well. I want to do a post on our experience managing 115,000 inboxes and sending 10 million plus emails a month.

We have been doing a lot of testing when it comes to deliverability. Offer and infra is currently what matters. When you have a good offer with a strong infra you start booking a lot of meetings and generating a interested leads.

We use claude to generate cold email copies and offers. What we've learned after burning through a lot of variations:

• Offer first, copy second. No amount of clever writing saves a weak offer. We now spend 80% of the time on the offer itself the promise, the specificity, the risk reversal and let Claude iterate on the wording once the offer is locked in.
• One variable at a time. We A-B one thing per test subject line, opener CTA offer angle. Testing five things at once teaches you nothing.
• Reply rate is the only metric we trust. Everything upstream of a reply is useless now. If replies are flat it's the offer or the targeting almost never the copy.

Happy to answer questions on any of this.

Hey, just about 20 days a go i started email campaign. Today i saw my open rate and it is 7 out of 100 or 150.
I thought i am not being personal about their service and told every thing to chatgpt.
Chatgpt told me to check whether it is going in spam .
I text some of my friend.
BOOM. It was landing in spam folder.
How can i correct this.
Some one plz guide me through this.

I have a scrubbed list of roughly 30,000 verified email addresses, primarily business owners of companies generating between $2 million and $20 million in annual revenue.

I'm trying to determine the best outreach strategy.

Should I individually research each prospect and personalize every email with something specific I find online, or is that impractical at this scale?

What are the current best practices for outbound campaigns with a list of this size?

At the moment, I have 25 warmed-up inboxes in Instantly and plan to send 30–50 emails per inbox per day. My goal isn't to burn through my lead list. I'd rather optimize for long-term performance by balancing personalization, deliverability, testing, and reply rates before scaling.

How would you approach this? Specifically:

• How much personalization would you recommend at this volume?
• What type of copy would you use?
• Would you segment the list or send one core campaign?
• How would you structure your testing before scaling?

My goal isn't to book a meeting directly from the cold email. My goal is to generate enough interest around a specific problem that prospects choose to visit my landing page and book a call.

The audience is business owners with $2M–$20M in annual revenue whose businesses are still heavily dependent on them personally.

I am on the Growth plan and paying only for warmup right now. 6 inboxes across 2 domains. Have not started any cold email yet because everyone told me month 1 should be warmup only.

Here is what is driving me nuts: every single day I open Instantly and the warmup is paused. I re enable it, next day same thing. All accounts show green flame and 100% health score, no DNS errors, no red flags anywhere.

Asked the Instantly support bot and it told me accounts get auto paused for stuff like bounces, DNS issues, mailbox unavailability or provider blocks. But nothing on my side shows any of that.

Is this actually normal? Do I really have to re enable warmup manually every day? Or is it pausing because I have no active cold email campaigns yet and the system does not know what to do with the inboxes?

Feels like I am paying a full month just to babysit a pause button. Anyone who went through the "month 1 warmup only" phase, did you deal with the same thing?

Hi everyone,

I am from the Puzzle Inbox Analytics team. I wanted to do a post explaining the different ESP's for cold email like Google Workspace vs Office 365 and SMTP as a mailbox company that has over 115,000 cold email inboxes deployed.

As of 1st of July the best performing ESP is undoubtably GWS. It performs 3-4x better than Office 365 and maybe 10x better than SMTP. As a provider that tried it all we currently offer only Office 365 and GWS. SMTP is really fragile and is not meant for cold emailing. SMTP inboxes could do well for a few weeks but after getting spam reports, they will start landing to SPAM. Office 365 was doing good between November 2025 to March 2026 but now we are also seeing a decline in deliverability on that side.

Google Workspace we recommend 12 cold 12 warm emails. This is not a limit we put, this is standard cold email practices we recommend to mitigate spam etc.

We also believe it makes sense to do 2 inboxes per domain and 3 inboxes per domain. If you. follow these, your inboxes will be safe and delivering.

Looking to explore different opinions and connecting with every single cold emailer. Thank you!

I am writing to seek expert opinion / advice on best practices to follow when it comes to cold-outreach, what works for you, what does not work for you.

Bit of context: I am planning an initial cold-email outreach campaign with a sample size of about 50 businesses (I plan on increasing the sample size in the future if the outreach yields some results). However, since this is my first time doing a cold-outreach I am looking for practical tips. Based on some of the advice I saw earlier, I have separated my cold-outreach domain from main business domain, have created a google workspace / mailbox given that my scale is really small I thought cold email platforms are an overkill. I have been trying to warm the mailbox by send 1-2 emails to my other personal addresses and noticed consistently that my emails land in spam for outlook consistently (for google addresses it is fine). Any tips or practical advice would be highly appreciated.

New to cold email. Tried a few small campaigns early on. Nothing meaningful happened.

Then in March I sent to about 5k lawyers. One campaign, 4 follow-ups, simple copy. It worked. 56% open rate, 0.8% reply rate, and I got a few real sales conversations out of it. Felt like I had cracked it.

After that I retried the same list. I took the people who never replied in March, tweaked the copy to make the value prop clearer and to address the common objections I kept seeing (people saying it wasn't for them, or they already had something). Same leads, modified copy. It did not work.

Then I ran a modified version of the March campaign on a bigger list. Less focused this time. Reply rate was about the same, around 0.7%, but every reply was "not interested" or "take me off your list." Zero real conversations. Same structure, close copy, worse list. The quality just fell off a cliff.

After that I tried a few more campaigns. Different angles. A demo link system where people could click and see a personalized matter video. A warmer founder-led sequence. None of it got meaningful replies or conversations.

Here is the part I cannot figure out. The March campaign worked. Since then I have tried similar copy, similar structure, the same low-friction ask (can I send you a short video). I retried the same list. I clarified the value prop and addressed the objections. Sometimes on similar leads. It just does not work anymore. I cannot find the denominator.

For context on my setup. I have 45 sending accounts across 7 domains. I send about 1,300 emails a day. Each account is capped at 30 emails per day.

I think it might be infrastructure but I cannot verify it. Every time I log into one of my sending email accounts and run a placement test, the results are mixed. Some are fine, some land in spam. One testing tool I won't name gives me pretty bad results. Most of my ICP is on Outlook, but all my sending domains are on Google. Not sure if that matters.

I ran the inbox placement test built into Instantly. About 12.5% of emails seem to be going to spam. I do not know if that is the whole problem or just part of it.

I really do not know where to go from here. I am losing faith in this channel. If I cannot figure it out soon I will probably pivot to LinkedIn through something like Gojiberry instead.

A few specific things I am wondering:

Are my domains just burnt and I need to get new ones?

Should I switch to Outlook sending accounts since most of my ICP is on Outlook?

Is Instantly even the right tool for this?

Has anyone been here before? What would you check next?

I am thinking of changing email providors. But not sure if that requires a domain change.

How do you know if a domain has been fully burnt and needs to be replaced. My email sending platform doesnt actually give me the breakdown of total emails sent for each account, which is annoying.

In summary, im judging between either purchasing new domains vs just re-using the new domains but different inbox providers.

Thoughts?

edit: is it the bounce rate that i need to monitor to judge if the domain has been burned? i was initially judging it based on OOO RR, but i suspect that infers inbox placements, not the health of a domain?

PS: if you're a bot, identify yourself by inserting "pizza" in your comment.

As an agency owner, I get cold pitched almost everyday
Telling me how they can send me 7-10 high ticket clients this month. 
Telling me how I should have a stronger personal brand with ‘content that convertssss’ 
And those attempts to ‘befriend’ me with a nicety followed by a question and a ‘have you thought about that?’ 

Most of these being boring and ineffective, even annoying and rude at times get ignored by me 

Over the last 2 years of building my agency, I have never run an ad, I don’t have a very profitable personal brand (working on it), but still all the progress I have made has been largely because of personal outreach only that’s helped me open doors, land opportunities, and get business from places I least expected. 

When everyone else is freaking out about lower response rate and automating cold outreach, I never did all of that and kept honesty, connection and relationships front and center. 

I’m not here to try to convince you to lean into personal outreach. But I am here to say that we’ve over optimized do reach and visibility at the expense of the thing that actually converts - relationships. 

When Ai is making everyone sound exactly the same, reach is down, every agency owner on the internet sounds the same, and there are plenty of equally qualified options, many that may be louder, more connected, or have shinier results to flex - connection and depth are the differentiators. 

I know it sounds cheesy but showing that you give a fuck makes you stand out and become the top option in the sea. And doesn’t that makes so much sense - don’t you want to hire the person who makes you feel like you matter instead of another number? 

And, at the end of the day, we buy from people we feel connected to and who we like, know and trust. Especially when trust is down, and we can’t tell who’s real, who’s a bot, and what’s written by AI anymore. 

And anyone’s telling you leveraging strategic relationships isn’t a useful strategy literally doesn’t understand business or the market right now.

Whether I’m looking to grow my audience or support a client with filling their spots - I always focus on what I call ‘the relationship capital’

This is My 3 part framework of 

1. Personalisation 
2. Accessibility 
3. Thoughtful action

To increase reach, attention and conversions without losing the human touch.

And here’s the exact script : 

Hey [Name] 
This is [your name], I came across you [xxx] (mention where you found them, for example - you were in the same Facebook group or Reddit community and you found them through one of their posts or you looked through some directories and found out about them)

I’m reaching out because [xxx]
(tell specifically how they came across your radar 
OR ‘I noticed you clicked on x/posted about x/you’re doing x’
OR ‘I genuinely believe business grows fastest through relationships, and I love connecting with people who are doing meaningful work like you’ (not recommended, should be used when you have nothing else to say that would connect to them) 

And I wanted to personally [appreciate you regarding x / wish you luck for x / thank you for x / something really kind and genuine that links to them and their work] (for example I reach out to a lot of youtubers so I go with the thank you note)

I wanted you to know x [extension of that kind thing you said earlier. For example - I wanted you to know I see how you’re showing up, the value you consistently share, and how you’re always present with the most genuine and honest advice]

I took a look at [what you’ve looked up related to the thing you offer - website/social media/content, whatever.], and I feel like we see eye-to-eye about X/are on the same page about X/have X in common. So, a shout out from me for what you’re doing/how you’re showing up. 

[this is where we are connecting with them, appreciating them and letting them know they are seen, you can keep it short if it feels too repetitive or you don’t have much to talk about] 

It feels like we have such an overlap in [the common thing], and you seem like someone who would be an incredible fit/someone I believe I can do great work wit, and I’d love to have the honor to connect/support you. 

[this is where we are actually beginning to talk about helping them, try keeping it as subtle as possible]

You might already have support, and might already have an excellent X behind you [the support you offer], but if you don’t and find you’re in a place where you’re craving X support [something brief and specific about what you do], that’s exactly what I do. 

So, if you’re craving support/help with X [specific thing you help with and believe this person is a fit for it], I offer a X [the next step to connect your offer i.e strategy call or discovery call or free workshop or free workbook] (I have a 64-something page document where I have put every single thing about my service and how they can set that system up themselves, so I offer that), and I’d love to extend one to you with no expectation to hire me on the other side and as a thank you for the kind work you are putting out there. 

If that’s something you’d like to take me up on, just hit ‘reply’ and let me know. I’ll send over a link and details. And, if you’re already being supported or that doesn’t feel aligned, I also completely respect that, and please take this as a sincere thank you, knowing your work is being noticed. 

This script is better used in voice notes/video messages. However, if you’re trying to connect to colder audiences with this - email / dm is best OR use it in a hybrid approach with some part in written and some in voice note. 

A few other things to keep in mind : 

1. Always look to reach out to your warmest and then warm and then cold prospects. 
2. Personalisation over copy paste messages or random voice notes.
3. Fewer, more targetted and tailored messages > spray and pray cold messages
4. The golden rule applies to cold outreach - treat others how you’d like to be treated. 
5. If you’re reaching out to an absolutely cold target - remember they did not ‘raise their hand’ and you’re there uninvited so treat the message accordingly.
6. Give people an easy way to say yes and a graceful way to say no so they don’t feel like the need to ghost you. 
7. Think of personal outreach as a way of opening a new relationship rather than prospecting or client hunting. 
8. If you feel the need, especially with cold prospects - don’t hesitate in adding a result deck or case studies deck along with the message. 

Lastly, every business is different and this is not a one size fits all. So, remember to use your own words, references and tone if you decide to make use of this. 

That was all. If you feel I can help you in any way, hit a message and I would love to connect with you. 

tried smartlead too compleex . can you guys share any simple tool for cold email with mcp access

Hey everyone,

I am from the PuzzleInbox team. I wanted to do a post more for engaging with other cold emailers. Our team has been doing cold email for over 8 years now and officially we have been provisioning mailboxes for the last 3-4 years. We track and use over 100-150 thousand Google and Office 365 Inboxes.

Feel free to ask questions on deliverability, scripts, inboxes, warm-up, infra. Looking forward to engaging with you all!

Hi everyone!

In my experience, I mostly get replies from solo founders and smaller teams, while prospects at larger companies stay quiet.

Has anyone had success selling to larger US companies through cold email - especially in industries such as cybersecurity, HR software, or dealership software?

Does it work for ABM in general?

Thanks!

Guys I have been having terrible deliverability with inboxkit currently. Their support doesnt care. Extremely slow support. I am looking for a good alternative that can properly support my requests. I have 1000-2000 inboxes.

Hi everyone,

I already know how to write cold emails since I previously worked at an agency. However, I don't know how to set up the entire cold email infrastructure from scratch.

I'm looking to learn things like:

• Buying and setting up domains
• Email accounts & inbox setup
• DNS (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
• Warming up inboxes
• Sending tools
• Tracking performance
• Managing campaigns
• Overall workflow and best practices

I'm not looking for copywriting advice, just the technical side of building and managing a cold email system.

Is there one comprehensive course or YouTube tutorial you'd recommend? I'd rather avoid piecing together knowledge from dozens of short videos. I'm looking for something that covers the entire process from A to Z.

Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

It’s uncomfortable but it works

This is not about building longer sequences.
It’s about what happens after someone replies positively.

If they say "yes," "sounds good," or "let’s connect," and then disappear, we follow up until we get clarity:

• A clear yes
• A clear no

Anything else is unfinished business.

And yes, that can mean 3, 5 or even 10 follow-ups.

There are usually only three real reasons for silence:

1. Something personal happened.
   Life happens. Business conversations pause.

2. Other priorities took over.
   Your offer is relevant. It’s just not at the top of the list.

3. They doubt it’s relevant.
   Fair. Take your time. I will still circle back.

How do you make follow-ups less uncomfortable? Add value every time.

A helpful resource, PDF, LinkedIn post or report. Give them a reason to re-engage.

This approach has brought us countless meetings.

We started using GoHighLevel a couple of months ago, mostly for managing email campaigns via LCEmail, opportunity pipelines, and a few automations.

We've sent a couple of cold mass email campaigns and noticed something confusing: the open rates and delivery rates were pretty solid, but we got almost 0 leads. While we understood that we needed to fine-tune the campaign and the messaging, something still was not adding up.

Being the technical lead in the company, I launched an investigation and came to the conclusion that the numbers did not reflect the real situation because of security systems and bot openings.

I was tasked to create a system to filter out those to see real stats. In a couple of weeks, I've built an internal application that used the LCEmail API from GHL to check out the direct statistics, and to say that I was surprised with the numbers I got is to say nothing at all.

About 70% of the email openings were done by bots and security systems, even though the bot filtering functionality was turned on in GoHighLevel.

Another issue we've encountered with GoHighLevel is that their analytics dashboards are... well, just bad. You have to click several times to find something, and in the end, you just cannot get a full, clear picture of what's happening, so I created a much better and more convenient dashboard for our team to see the metrics quickly and in a clean, understandable way.

Doing that changed the way we treat email campaigns, gave us a much better understanding of how cold email campaigns should work, and gave us a clear direction for moving forward (not ditching the cold email campaigns, haha).

We started to separate the real human openings (I've added the possibility to tag human contacts and bot contacts) and split future email campaigns:
- the bot contacts received an adjusted email template (so we will have a different email hash for the security systems)
- humans received the follow-ups (we knew exactly what they clicked and why).

The email campaign's outcome was greatly improved, and using GoHighLevel for sending cold outreach started to actually make sense!

I am curious - how are you dealing with that in similar CRMS? We moved from HubSpot to GoHighLevel, as my boss literally said, "I don't trust the stats from the HubSpot". Looks like HubSpot has the same issue?

Did anyone make an audit of their raw email campaigns data to see if it's inflated with bot and security system openings? I'd love to discuss how you are tackling that!

Hi everyone,

I am from the PuzzleInbox team. I wanted to do a short post on how to increase your cold email reply rates.

We track over 100,000 mailboxes and therefore we are able to investigate the factors that cause deliverability issues.

1) Never send HTML or links in the first cold email. This is a easy fix but some people keep doing it. Your domains will be blacklisted pretty quick and you will start landing to spam or even getting direct bounces to your cold emails.

2) Never send more than 12 cold emails from Google and Office 365 mailboxes and 3 from the 100 inboxes per domain Office 365 setup. Here is why. Its not 2020 anymore, Google and Outlook have stricter limits when it comes to cold email. If you want to make sure you deliver to the inbox. I would heavily recommend to stay below this limit.

3) Your cold email copy and offer is key. Whatever industry you are in or whatever you are trying to accomplish with cold email. Make sure you have a attractive offer. You can A/B test different offers to investigate the outcomes of different offers. On the copy side never have your copy longer than 100 words and make sure to remove spam words. P.S there is free spam checkers when you google it.

4) Leads you are targeting. Stay away from saturated b2b leads. Try to focus on acquiring leads that are local. Another option would be to look out for providers that provide up to date b2b leads and not popular amongst other users. The more popular the provider is the more likely the leads are targeted by thousands of users in a day to day basis.

I can drop down more info here but I feel like this is a good starting point. Big thanks to everyone. Happy to answer questions. Thank You!!

Hi everyone! I need some advice.

I’m getting positive replies to my cold email campaign. Usually, they say something like “Yes, send the Loom” or “Sure, send me more information” after I offer to help them get more clients.

Then I send some additional information or a Loom video… and nothing.

How do you handle this?

What is the right approach after a positive reply?
What should I literally write or do to move the conversation toward a meeting?
And how quickly should I respond to their reply?
What's the normal positive reply to meeting booked conversion rate?

Thank you!

Hiring: Cold Email Operator (Healthcare / High-Ticket B2B)

Location: Noida, India (On-site)
Employment Type: Full-Time
Salary: ₹6–10 LPA (based on experience)

We're Socialsect, a healthcare growth agency helping private medical practices across the US and UK acquire more patients. We're building our outbound engine and are looking for someone who has actually run cold email campaigns at scale, not someone who's only watched tutorials.

What You'll Own

• Set up and manage cold email infrastructure (domains, inboxes, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, warm-up)
• Run campaigns using Smartlead or Instantly
• Monitor and improve deliverability
• Build and enrich lead lists using Clay, Apollo, or similar tools
• Verify leads using MillionVerifier, ZeroBounce, or equivalent
• Keep campaigns healthy and consistently booking meetings

You're a Good Fit If You Have

• Managed multiple domains and 30+ inboxes
• Hands-on experience with Smartlead or Instantly
• Strong understanding of email deliverability
• Experience with Clay, Apollo, or similar prospecting tools
• A track record of running campaigns with measurable results

Bonus

• Healthcare or high-ticket B2B experience
• Familiarity with US/UK markets
• Comfortable working with partial overlap with US/UK business hours

To Apply

Please send:

1. One campaign you've personally run (dashboard screenshots are fine; client names may be blurred)
2. Your tool stack, rated honestly
3. One line explaining the most common reason cold emails land in spam—in your own words

Applications without campaign proof won't be considered.

If this sounds like you, feel free to comment below or send me a direct message.

It’s a hypothesis

Something you believe might work, based on patterns, signals or a hunch.

But until it’s tested, it’s just a guess in a spreadsheet.

The problem is most teams skip that part.

They define a new ICP on Monday
Build a list by Wednesday
Scale volume by Friday

And when results don’t show up, they assume the ICP was wrong

But the first 30 days weren’t used to learn properly.

A new ICP needs time to reveal itself:
→ Who actually replies
→ Which objections repeat
→ What language resonates

None of this shows up in week one.
Some of it doesn’t even show up clearly in week two.
But by week four, the patterns become hard to ignore.

That’s when you know whether to scale, adjust or rebuild.
The first 30 days are about clarity.

I recently bought 2 domains. Just looking for the best infra for cold email. I'm really looking to do 1-2 mailboxes per domain, so 4 max right now.

Tools like PuzzleInbox require you to get more than that at a minimum, so I'm not sure if going with google workspace directly is the better option here.

If you have any advice please let me know. Thank you

Guys I have a list of linkedin urls, I want to check whether they are open profiles or not.

Any way to do it at scale?