I don't really read fiction books, but I read Shantaram and this one was great.
Though I have an Indian middle name (thanks to my parents who were quite spiritual and wanted to give their child a sanskrit middle name), it’s this book that made me want to travel to India.
It's a wonderful adventure. I recommend it to all my friends, and they all love it. Great read!
I run MailReach, and before that, me and my cofounder spent years in an agency doing cold outreach. So we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand the science of deliverability. Deliverability of your cold emails is a result of a lot of tiny decisions you make and oftentimes, it’s hard to pinpoint where you went wrong.
But there’s one thing we’ve seen over and over again that leads to bad deliverability that no one really talks about. The domains you choose to buy for your cold outreach. Anyone who knows a bit about cold outreach knows you should never use your own domain for it. You should also avoid subdomains. You need to get separate domains which are similar to your main domain. For example: getmailreach.com.
Most people know this much, and they go ahead and buy anything that’s available that’s similar to their main domain. They focus on getting the brand name and nothing else. The result is often a bunch of domains that look like this:
get-brand(dot)com
Try-brand(dot)com
brand01(dot)com
brand2(dot)com
brand(dot)site
brand(dot)global
brand(dot)studio
Brand(dot)ish
trybrand(dot)now
Unfortunately, these domain names can cost you a lot by hurting your domain reputation before you even do anything.
Why? Because they don’t seem reputed. Hyphens and numbers are commonly used by spammers and worse, scammers. So mailbox providers are especially suspicious of such domains and you’ll need to go out of your way to prove otherwise.
This is often the first step most people take before they get started with cold email. And it honestly can set you up for failure. So please choose wisely:
I hope this post helps some of you avoid this mistake.
I’m someone who’s worked in cold outreach for 10 years before building a solution in this space (MailReach). If you’re in B2B cold outreach, I have one suggestion for you that will save you soo much headache and money later:
Please invest in getting real first-hand Google Workspace and/ Office 365 mailboxes. It’s much more expensive to begin with, but it pays off much more in the long run because you won’t have to jump through hoops to land in your receivers’ primary inboxes.
You won’t be fighting a losing battle with Google & Microsoft’s spam filters. You won’t need to keep burning domains and purchasing new ones.
When you send cold emails from real Google Workspace or O365 mailboxes, your sender reputation is much higher and your inbox placement is far better. We have the data internally that proves that. Any other provider is sub-optimal.
Deliverability is already complex enough without you starting with a handicap by choosing cheap, or secondhand mailboxes.
Hey everyone. I’ve been actively following the kind of questions and discussions in this community and I realized that there’s one thing that’s not very commonly discussed regarding deliverability of cold outreach emails: unsubscribe links.
There’s a lot of things under deliverability, but if there’s one thing that makes a big difference (positively or negatively, based on whether or not it's present), its unsub links.
Whenever you’re sending ANY kind of cold emails, you must have a clear and prominently visible (functioning) unsub link in the email.
Let me be very clear. You can’t ask them to reply with STOP or NO if they want to stop receiving your emails. That’s not enough.
And Google / Microsoft understand these negative replies. You don’t want that.
You can’t have the greyed out tiny unsubscribe link somewhere difficult to find. Remember, this is not a newsletter that they opted into, so it has to be up there and visible.
And of course, the link should work. As in, they should be immediately unsubscribed if they click that. Please don’t have the link take them to their website and ask them to check out your offering or ask them why they want to leave, etc. delaying the process.
Guys, it’s simple: if you recipients can’t find your unsub link or if it’s not working: your number of spam complaints will be multiplied and your sender reputation will be burned in no time. Don’t make things difficult for them.
And no, it won’t decrease your lead / reply rate. That’s just respect for the recipients. If your offer / copy is good, you’ll still get leads. And a much better deliverability.
Hey everyone. I’ve been actively following the kind of questions and discussions in this community and I realized that there’s one thing that’s not very commonly discussed regarding deliverability of cold outreach emails: unsubscribe links.
There’s a lot of things under deliverability, but if there’s one thing that makes a big difference (positively or negatively, based on whether or not it's present), its unsub links.
Whenever you’re sending ANY kind of cold emails, you must have a clear and prominently visible (functioning) unsub link in the email.
Let me be very clear. You can’t ask them to reply with STOP or NO if they want to stop receiving your emails. That’s not enough.
And Google / Microsoft understand these negative replies. You don’t want that.
You can’t have the greyed out tiny unsubscribe link somewhere difficult to find. Remember, this is not a newsletter that they opted into, so it has to be up there and visible.
And of course, the link should work. As in, they should be immediately unsubscribed if they click that. Please don’t have the link take them to their website and ask them to check out your offering or ask them why they want to leave, etc. delaying the process.
Guys, it’s simple: if you recipients can’t find your unsub link or if it’s not working: your number of spam complaints will be multiplied and your sender reputation will be burned in no time. Don’t make things difficult for them.
And no, it won’t decrease your lead / reply rate. That’s just respect for the recipients. If your offer / copy is good, you’ll still get leads. And a much better deliverability.
I've seen a lot of you posting about your cold email approach and it seems like most of you are doing too many follow-ups.
Keep in mind that the more follow-ups you send, the more spam complaints you get. And spam complaints are really harmful in 2026.
In our experience, the ideal number of follow-ups is 2. With at least 3, and up to 6 days gap between each. If you send more than 2 follow-ups (3 emails in total), your risk of burning your sender reputation is multiplied. And then it destroys your inbox placement. Which, at the end of the day, makes you miss revenue.
If you want to send more than 2 follow-ups then switch to LinkedIn messages, just not by email.
I've seen a lot of you posting about your cold email approach and it seems like most of you are doing too many follow-ups.
Keep in mind that the more follow-ups you send, the more spam complaints you get. And spam complaints are really harmful in 2026.
In our experience, the ideal number of follow-ups is 2. With at least 3, and up to 6 days gap between each. If you send more than 2 follow-ups (3 emails in total), your risk of burning your sender reputation is multiplied. And then it destroys your inbox placement. Which, at the end of the day, makes you miss revenue.
If you want to send more than 2 follow-ups then switch to LinkedIn messages, just not by email.