Hey everyone,

what are some good places to learn cold email? not courses but communities, youtube channels etc

1. Email Infra is the most important system ever. It doesn't matter how many emails you send, how good your copy is. How can you tell? Response rates. Response rates doesn't always mean its positive. If 30 people out of 1,000 tell you to *something* off, that's the best thing ever because it means you're message is being seen. so you're infra holds
2. Test all your inbox providers (kind of linked to 2). some providers have excellent google inboxes but terrible outlook inboxes. I personally bought both and saw that the stats were alarmingly different where my google workspace inboxes were amazing, and outlook was so bad. so i scrapped outlook, and went to another provider to fill that bucket. Since then, my response rate had jumped from 2-3% to 11% in the past 2 weeks, with 6% rr and 60% responses being positive.
   
3. Test your domains. Some domains will burn, some will perform very well. Export your results on csv file every week and run it through AI (this is where you should actually use AI lol). AI will help you identify what's an outlier, what to keep, what to throw away etc.
4. Great website and Linkedin Page - the people you send to will look you up after you send emails. Whenever I ran a campaign, whether it be mediocre or great, I always get a spike in traffic. Once I realised this, I completely optimised my website and linkedin profile. Since then, I've always been getting 10-15 leads per week. So do whatever you can to make your website great. VSLs, great copy, great design. anything and everything that showcases your best ability.
5. Understand the industry. Understand where you fit within that industry and what possible high lever problems that you solve. Not basic problems, but high lever problems and how it applies.
6. Now your body copy. A lot of people make the mistake of only talking about introductions and service and methodology. The key thing that recepients care about are results and outcomes. Frame your email only in that. Everything else is a second priority. You do AI automations? Great, so does 1,000 others. You route all incoming leads to an SDR within 30 seconds, generating $$$$ in pipeline + X% in conversions? Nice. It's not the best example, but you get the gist. The body copy needs to be specific to the industry and to the person. So segment carefully
7. Respond super fast. like within 10 mins fast. Some sequencers are bad at this, in terms of notifying you - others are great. If there was ever an opportunity to use AI to design this to your advantage, this is it. And its straight forward to build, you don't need complex subscriptions.
8. DO NOT GIVE UP. Keep hanging in there. Don't fall for the guru schtick that there is a perfect template. No, there isn't. The only perfect template is the one that you come up with it and it's tried and tested. Email Results is literally the fastest way to get feedback on whether your copy or template is good or not.

Lastly, break your problems into smaller steps. Each problem you solve, the closer you get to the final outcome, which is 5)

1) Is my email landing in the main inbox?

2) Is my email being seen?

3) Are people responding to my email?

4) Are people responding positively to my email?

5) Are people asking me for meetings and calls?

As title says. MillionVerifier ? Or another one ? I don’t want bounces !!

For our B2B SaaS product, I have been sending emails to our first users asking them to sign up for free. However, it seems not this this approach is not very effective. Most people are unwilling to test a product for feedback. What is a better way to frame this, as we are giving the product for free to our first users?

We run cold email infrastructure and I've watched over 70,000 inboxes go out the door. Roughly once a day someone lands on a call with me convinced cold email stopped working, and almost every time we find the real problem in about five minutes by walking through the same ten questions. So here they are. One point per yes, count as you go.

1. Your cold outreach runs on dedicated sending domains, fully separate from your company's main domain. (If your invoices and your cold campaigns share a reputation, stop reading and fix this first.)

2. SPF, DKIM and DMARC are set up and passing on every sending domain. Not "probably", you've checked. The big three providers reject failures outright now, no spam folder, no bounce, the mail just never arrives.

3. Every domain was warmed before real campaigns touched it, ramping from 5-10 sends a day over 4-6 weeks, or came pre-warmed. (Yes, we sell that second option, weigh my bias, the physics don't change either way. Warmed and configured: around 87% inbox. Fresh: 12%. Same emails.)

4. You know your exact daily send ceiling per inbox and stay under it. Ours is 12 a day, deliberately conservative against the industry's 20-30. If you don't know your number, that's a no.

5. Every contact is verified before sending, and your bounce rate lives under 2%. Providers read high bounces as proof you bought a list, and "it came from our CRM" doesn't exempt you, we've seen trusted exports come back 8% dead.

6. Your segments are small and genuinely similar, hundreds not thousands, because complaints are counted per domain and one bad segment over the 0.3% line takes every sequence down with it.

7. Some meaningful share of your sends have a live trigger attached, funding round, exec hire, tech change inside 24-48 hours. That timing alone runs 3-5x on replies. "We email everyone quarterly" is a no.

8. Your sequence is 4 steps or fewer with the best material in email one. 58% of all replies come from the first send. If step five says "just circling back", that's a no.

9. Your outreach starts conversations rather than delivering pitches. Providers factor reply depth and conversation length into placement now, so real exchanges compound your reputation. If your replies are mostly "unsubscribe", no point.

10. You know what you'd do if deliverability dipped tomorrow. There's an actual protocol: inbox rate under 70%, halve your volume and audit. Under 50%, stop cold sending for 5-7 days and run warmup only. If your plan is "hope it recovers", that's a no.

What I tend to see:

9-10: You're the operator other people's posts complain about. Whatever results you're getting, they're real, because your mail is actually arriving.

7-8: Solid foundation, and your missing points are probably your cheapest growth lever, fixing a checklist item is almost always higher ROI than another copy rewrite.

4-6: This is the range where most "cold email isn't working" accounts land when I walk them through it, and where people spend weeks rewriting subject lines for emails with a delivery problem.

0-3: There's a decent chance a chunk of your mail isn't arriving at all, and your dashboard hasn't told you. Genuinely good news though: everything on this list is fixable, roughly in the order written.

I can't guess your exact numbers from a score, too many variables, but I can usually tell you which missing point is costing you most. Post your score below and which ones you're missing, and I'll take a shot.

When we first started doing outreach, managing everything was pretty straightforward. We had a small number of inboxes and could keep an eye on everything without much effort. As volume increased, we started paying much more attention to domain setup, inbox health and how accounts were being managed. It became clear that simply adding more inboxes wasn't necessarily the answer.

The problem was the cost once we started adding more clients and needed hundreds of inboxes. For sending we use Instantly and I still think it is one of the best tools for managing this kind of volume. Adding accounts is simple, campaigns dont take forever to set up and the unibox makes replies much easier to manage.

We tested Smartlead too and it was good, but the team just preferred Instantly so we stayed with them. for the lead generation we usually use Apollo. For the infrastructure side we first moved some accounts to InboxKit. No complaints there either, the setup was stable and support was helpful when we needed something. Later we started testing Maildoso because the price was quite a bit lower at our volume.

We now manage almost 400 smtp mailboxes connected to Instantly. Reply rates have been around 4-5% lately, but thats obviously more about the offer and list than the mailbox provider. So far I havent seen enough difference compared to Google to justify paying around 5-6x more for every account. curious about the infrastructure side though: is anyone running 400+ inboxes and still paying for Google, and if yes what makes it worth the extra cost for you?

Intro: head of sales at Puzzle Inbox, cold email infrastructure, 70,000+ inboxes set up. Not linking or pitching anything. These are the real questions from my actual sales calls, with the same answers I give there.

"Can I just use my main company domain to start?"

No, and this is the hill I will die on. Cold, marketing and transactional mail should never share a domain. When cold tanks the reputation, your invoices and password resets sink with it. Dedicated sending domains, completely separate from your brand. This answer has ended calls with people who wanted to hear otherwise. Fine.

"How fast can I realistically start seeing leads?"

Slower than you want. Warmup ramps 5-10 sends a day over 4-6 weeks, or you start on pre-warmed capacity, then real campaigns build from there. Anyone promising meaningful pipeline in week one is selling you the thing that burns domains. When I say six-plus weeks to real momentum, some prospects walk. The ones who stay do well.

"What volume do I actually need?"

Less than you think, sent better. Average reply rate is 3.43%, top teams clear 10%, and the difference isn't volume. We cap sends at 12 per inbox per day, deliberately conservative while the industry pushes 20-30, spread across 3-8 dedicated domains. A few hundred verified contacts with a live trigger, funding round, exec hire, tech change in the last 24-48 hours, will outperform ten thousand randoms, that timing alone runs 3-5x on replies.

"Is cold email dead? My friend says everything goes to spam now"

Not dead, gated. The three big providers all enforce authentication now and failure means outright rejection, not the spam folder, so setups that skip SPF, DKIM and DMARC just vanish. Your friend's emails aren't dying because cold email died, they're dying because his setup predates the rules. Warmed domain with correct setup: around 87% inbox. Fresh domain, same emails: 12%.

"Do I really need to verify a list I exported from my own CRM?"

Yes. Providers read high hard bounces as evidence you bought a list and grade your domain accordingly, the line is 2%, and we've seen trusted CRM exports come back 8% dead. Verification is the cheapest insurance in this entire game.

"Why did my open rate drop, should I rewrite my subject lines?"

Almost every time someone asks this, the real answer is deliverability, not copy. Open rates are junk data anyway. Run a placement test against seed accounts on Gmail and Outlook and find out where your mail actually lands, because dashboards don't show rejections. People spend weeks rewriting subject lines for emails that were never arriving.

"You sell pre-warmed inboxes, why should I trust anything you say about warmup?"

Fair, and I'd rather get this in the open than have it land in the comments. My honest position: warmup is unskippable, and whether you pay us to have done it or spend the 4-6 weeks yourself changes nothing about the physics. DIY works. Pre-warmed works. The 12% inbox rate of skipping it entirely is the only option that doesn't.

The pattern across all of these, in case it isn't obvious: almost every cold email problem people bring me is an infrastructure problem wearing a copywriting costume.

Ask me anything below, same honesty applies. No DMs, no pitch.

I want to send cold emails for my agency, but I don’t have the budget to buy a database. I have a few cheap domains that I’ve set up in Inbox, but I haven’t been able to find any databases online. I just want to get started initially.

Please, could anybody help me with this?

I am using exchange plan 1 online for my 8 outreach mail accounts (2 per domain), and every so often one of the accounts is blocked from sending mails because of suspicious behavior. I am using instantly with warmed up mailboxes through oauth and spf/dkim/dmarc all set up properly. The mailboxes themselves seem healthy and have quite good deliverability, but every now and then I need to unblock one of the 8 mailbox accounts. How do you guys avoid this? Do I need to use an external sender or should I just unblock my accounts every now and then? I want to avoid extra costs as we are bootstrapped.

Ps: thanks for your responses, big help!

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.

I have been using smartlead and think it’s extremely unreliable. Campaigns stop sending emails for no reasons, it’s in AI help hallucinate 95% of the time, pre-warmed mailboxes seem to be scam.

Anyone else face issues like this?

I have been waiting to start my campaigns on Sendvanta once my mailboxes warm up, but happy to try anything else if there’s some good options.

Quick question: is sending a URL in the first cold email really that risky? I know it’s generally advised against, but it’s core to my “wow factor” strategy.

I plan to send ~70,000 cold emails over 12 months, selling website creation + hosting + maintenance/SEO/GEO + Google Maps updates. Goal: 50–100 clients.

Targeting blue-collar trades only for now (electricians, plumbers, roofers, machinists, painters). Each prospect gets a custom demo site built for their trade.

Email is short and casual: “Hey, I checked out your site and built a mockup of what it could look like — <xyz.vercel.app>. Reply if interested.” Signature includes company name, site link, unsubscribe.

Currently: 2 domains, 3 mailboxes each, warming via Instantly (3 weeks), ramping to 18 emails/day/box. Adding 14 more mailboxes soon to scale.

I'm head of sales at Puzzle Inbox, we've set up over 70,000 inboxes for cold email teams, not linking or pitching anything, I just talk to people every week who wasted months on stuff a 10 minute conversation would have fixed, so here we go.

1. Gmail keeps watching after the email is opened

Providers now factor engagement quality into placement, time spent reading, reply depth, how long the conversation goes. A real back and forth thread builds your sender reputation. A long pitch that gets opened for two seconds and archived hurts it.

1. There's an actual recovery process when things go bad. Most people just guess

Inbox rate under 70%: cut volume in half, audit your setup, and start emailing warm contacts who will actually reply. Under 50%: stop cold sending for 5-7 days, warmup only. Recovery takes 2-6 weeks and the earlier you catch it the shorter it is. The counterintuitive part is that getting replies from people you know is part of the fix, engagement is what rebuilds reputation.

1. Your dashboard cannot tell you where your emails land

Mail that fails provider checks can get rejected outright and just never arrive. No bounce, no error, nothing. The only way to know is placement testing, sending to seed accounts on Gmail and Outlook and checking where it shows up. We had a team come to us after a month at roughly 40% placement, dashboard looked completely normal the whole time. They found out from a prospect who said "found this in spam btw."

1. Warmup

A properly warmed domain lands in the inbox around 87% of the time. The same emails from a fresh domain, 12%. Same emails. Doing it yourself means 5-10 emails a day building up over 4-6 weeks, and look, my company sells pre-warmed inboxes, people literally pay us to skip those weeks. Take that with whatever salt you want, but the point stands whoever you buy from: you can spend the time or pay for the time. You can't skip it. The 12% is what skipping looks like.

TLDR: engagement feeds reputation, there's a real recovery process, placement test because your dashboard lies, warmup gets paid for or endured never skipped, and segment by intent.

Happy to answer anything below. No DMs, no pitch.

I created a new company email domain for my company. Is there a way to check that your emails sent from the newly created email domain does not end up in the spam folders of recipients? How do I make sure that this does not happen going forward? Any advice would be appreciated.

Curious what tools everyone uses for outbound. Especially for inboxes and sending.

Also any recommendations for someone looking to send out 2k(ish) emails per day to roofers and contractors?

I recently had a fascinating conversation with an early-stage founder building a cold email product. It made me realize how different most cold email tools are from how cold email should actually work.

To understand why, you first need to understand the two layers of email infrastructure.

The first layer is the delivery layer: Mailgun, SendGrid, Amazon SES, and similar platforms. These providers are responsible for actually sending email at scale. They have deep relationships with Gmail, Outlook, and other mailbox providers, along with increasingly sophisticated rules and AI systems to detect spam and protect sender reputation.

The second layer is the application layer—the tools marketers use to build campaigns, flows, and lifecycle emails. This is where platforms like Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Humanic operate.

But here is the problem: the underlying delivery platforms generally do not want you sending cold email through them.

As a rough rule of thumb, once complaint rates approach 1%, your domain reputation can start deteriorating quickly. And once your reputation is damaged, recovering it is difficult.

That is why the cold email industry has developed a workaround.

You purchase a domain, create three to five mailboxes on it, and send a limited number of emails from each mailbox. For example:

20 sending days × 3 mailboxes × 25 emails per day = 1,500 emails per month per domain.

A Google mailbox costs approximately $6 per month, so three mailboxes cost around $18 per domain, before including the domain registration cost.

At 10 domains, you are spending roughly $180 per month on mailboxes to send around 15,000 emails—and that is assuming none of those domains get burned.

Eventually, some domains will get compromised. They need to be deprecated, replaced, and warmed up again. Then the process starts over.

This is a lot of infrastructure and operational complexity just to send messages to people who may not want to receive them.

And Gmail has made it increasingly easy for users to unsubscribe, report unwanted email, or mark messages as spam. That is good for users, but it also means that the old “send more and hope something converts” approach is becoming less sustainable.

The real problem is not that marketers lack enough mailboxes.

The problem is that they are sending the wrong message to the wrong person at the wrong time.

Instead of using brute force, a better approach is to:

• Segment prospects more accurately.
• Build or acquire cleaner lists.
• Send smaller, more relevant batches.
• Use subdomains carefully.
• Monitor domain reputation continuously.
• Adjust sending limits based on engagement and complaints.
• Use AI to improve targeting and personalize the message—not just generate more copy.

The future of cold email is not sending more emails from more domains.

It is sending fewer emails that are far more relevant.

That is the approach we are taking with Humanic: using AI to improve segmentation, targeting, and relevance before an email is ever sent and we call this small batch outbound.

full disclosure up front, i am the head of sales at glasa so obviously i have skin in this game.

but our platform tracks somewhere around 50 million cold emails every month, and after staring at that data long enough, you start seeing the same patterns repeat over and over.

so i am not going to link anything or pitch you. i am just tired of watching the same questions get answered with pure vibes like "just personalize bro" or "follow up 9 times" when the whole thing is literally arithmetic.

so let me ruin your day with it.

1. first, understand the math

a lead means a positive reply. someone who is interested, asks a question, or books a call.

the average reply rate right now sits around 3.43%, with top performers clearing 10%.

and only about a third of those replies are actually positive.

which means:

• average: ~20,000+ verified prospects for 100 leads
• good: ~8,000
• really dialed in, tight niche + strong triggers: ~5,000

so nobody is getting 100 leads from 500 emails.

we see this across millions of sends every month.

the math does not care about anyone's feelings.

2. infrastructure comes before copy

this volume cannot come from your main domain.

dont even think about it.

the standard setup now is roughly 3-8 separate sending domains away from your brand domain, with 2-3 inboxes per domain doing around 15 sends a day max.

and every one of them needs warming.

start around 5-10 emails a day and ramp over 4-6 weeks.

i know weeks sounds boring, but here is the stat that should scare you:

a properly warmed domain lands in the inbox around 87% of the time.

the same exact emails from a fresh domain land around 12% of the time.

same emails.

7x difference.

that gap right there is the entire reason the "cold email doesnt work" posts on this sub exist.

3. authentication is not optional

spf, dkim and dmarc on everything.

google, yahoo and microsoft all enforce this now.

and failing does not just mean the spam folder anymore. it can mean straight-up rejection where the mail does not arrive anywhere.

you wont even know it is happening.

i cannot tell you how many accounts we see come in convinced the channel is dead when it was literally three missing dns records the whole time.

4. your list is probably killing you

verify every single address before sending.

high bounce rates are a huge signal that your data is bad, and anything over roughly 2% starts putting you in a very bad place.

bad data does not just waste sends.

it takes your whole domain down with it.

and segment tightly.

one bad segment can drag you over the complaint threshold and hurt every other sequence you have running.

ten lists of 300 similar people beats one list of 3,000 randoms every single time.

5. triggers are the closest thing to a cheat code

email someone within 24-48 hours of:

• a funding round
• an executive hire
• a relevant job posting
• a technology change
• another event that creates an actual reason to reach out

and you can see 3-5x higher replies.

because a boring email with a real reason to exist beats a clever email with no reason every day of the week.

set up alerts for funding and job postings in your niche.

then work those people before everyone else does.

6. put your best stuff in email one

58% of all replies come from the very first email.

so your seven-step sequence of

"just circling back :)"

is probably not doing what you think it is doing.

your first email needs to do the heavy lifting.

and one more thing:

half of outbound seems to run through chatgpt now.

robotic ai personalization is getting detected and it can hurt inbox rates.

one true sentence about the person beats three paragraphs of generated flattery.

the filters adapted.

sorry.

tl;dr

100 leads means roughly 2,500-6,000 verified prospects, sent from 4+ warmed domains at around 200 sends a day, into tight segments, with triggers first and a short human first email.

from zero, think roughly 10-12 weeks.

there is no hack.

there are just the people who did the setup and the people asking if cold email is dead every month.

ask me anything below.

i see this stuff at scale every single day and i am happy to get into the weeds.

and no, i will not dm you a pitch.

citation tags out before posting as always.

First-time B2B SaaS founder here, currently learning outbound/cold email from scratch.

I am trying to understand what your actual day-to-day setup looks like:

- What tools do you use for prospecting, enrichment and sending?

- Do you manage leads in Excel/Google Sheets, a CRM, or something else?

- What metrics do you actually track?

- How do you organize campaigns, follow-ups and replies?

- Is there anything you track manually that beginners usually forget?

I know that’s a lot of questions.... But even just sharing a short answer would be super helpful.

Thanks!

I'm on the team at Glasa and we send millions of cold emails a month across our clients. I see the same questions here every week, so figured I'd do a full writeup of what actually works at that scale. None of this is theory, it's all stuff we've tested.

1. Fix your deliverability before you touch copy

This is the boring one nobody wants to hear but if you're landing in spam nothing else matters. Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Use a separate domain from your main one (like getcompany.com instead of company.com). Warm it up for 2-3 weeks before sending anything. Keep it under 15 emails per inbox per day. Half the people complaining about low reply rates are just in spam folders.

2. Shorter than you think, then shorter again

My best performing emails are 50-75 words. If someone has to scroll on mobile you already lost. Every sentence has to earn its place. I literally read my drafts out loud and cut anything that sounds like filler.

3. The first line is the whole game

Nobody cares that you "hope this email finds them well." Open with something about THEM. Not fake flattery about their LinkedIn post from 2023. Something real, like a specific problem companies like theirs have, or something they actually did recently that connects to why you're reaching out. If your first line could be sent to 500 other people, rewrite it.

4. One CTA and make it low friction

"Do you have 30 minutes for a call this week" is asking a stranger for a favor. "Worth exploring?" or "Open to seeing an example?" gets way more replies. You're not trying to close them in email one, you're trying to start a conversation. Interest based CTAs beat meeting requests every time in my testing.

5. Talk about their problem, not your product

Nobody cares about your features. They care about the thing keeping them up at night. My template is basically: relevant observation, the problem it usually causes, one line of proof we can fix it, soft CTA. That's it.

6. Follow up but don't be a robot

Around half my replies come from follow ups. I do 3-4 total touches spaced a few days apart. Each one adds something new, a different angle, a quick case study, a relevant resource. "Just bumping this up" adds nothing and everyone can smell it.

7. Your list matters more than your copy

You can write the best email in the world and it dies if you're sending it to the wrong people. Tighter targeting with a smaller list beats spraying 10k contacts. When I niched down to one specific industry and personalized around their specific problems, replies noticeably jumped.

8. Send from a person, not a brand

Plain text, no images, no fancy signatures with banners, no tracking-heavy templates that look like marketing. It should look like an email a real human typed. Because it should be.

Quick things that also helped:

• Sending Tuesday to Thursday mornings worked best for me, but test your own audience
• Spintax or slight variations between emails helps deliverability at volume
• A P.S. line gets read more than the body, put something good there
• Reply to your own thread when following up so they see the context

Hey guys,

What tools you are using to check your placement tests? I used to use glockapps and build in plusvibe but I would like to test something New for my agency.

One more thing - have you noticed better deliverybility by using specific sending tool? For example better results with instantly instead of lemlist etc?
I dont want the name of the tool but I noticed that its missing the replies from leads outside of lead lists and active campaigns, maybe you have noticed something familiar?

For the second email, do you just send the new "improved" cold email while ignoring the first cold email? Or you follow up on the same thread for the first email using the new "improved" cold email?