After 2 years of cold email i finally stopped landing in spam. heres everything that actually worked (long post sorry)
the infrastructure stuff (most people skip this and wonder why they're in spam)
seriously the boring technical setup is like 80% of deliverability. nobody wants to hear that because its not sexy but its true.
domains — buy aged domains when you can. brandpa, odys, even just expired domains from namecheap auctions. fresh domains are fine but you need to baby them longer. and spread across multiple registrars, dont have all your eggs in godaddy.
inboxes — i stopped setting up google workspace myself. too many things to get wrong with DNS, DKIM records, MX setup. i just buy them from puzzleinbox now, come pre-configured and warmed, you literally just plug them into your sender. saves me like half a day per campaign which adds up fast when you're running multiple clients
SPF, DKIM, DMARC — non negotiable. check them on mxtoolbox before you send a single email. i cant count how many times ive seen people blame their copy when their DMARC isnt even set up lol
sending limits that actually work
- 20-30 emails per inbox per day to start, scale up slowly over 2-3 weeks
- no more than 3-4 inboxes per domain
- randomize your send times, dont blast everything at 9am
- i use smartlead for sequencing, works well with multiple inboxes
leads and list quality
this one kills people. a dirty list will tank a healthy domain in like 2 weeks.
apollo for scraping, clay for enrichment (their waterfall verification is genuinely good), then run everything through millionverifier or zerobounce before it touches a sequence. yes it costs money. yes its worth it. getting a 15% bounce rate is not a deliverability problem its a you problem
also scrub catch-all emails or at least put them in a separate lower-volume sequence. they're risky.
actual email writing stuff
ok now the copy part
- plain text or very close to it. images, logos, fancy HTML = spam trigger. your first touch should look like an email from a friend
- subject lines that dont sound like subject lines. "quick question" still works. so does just their first name. the more it looks like a marketing email the worse it performs
- first line has to prove you looked at them. not "i saw you work in SaaS" — actually specific. "saw you just opened a second location in Austin" or "noticed you're hiring 3 SDRs"
- short. like really short. 4-6 sentences max on the first touch. people arent reading your essay
- one CTA, not three. "would it make sense to chat?" not "let me know if you want a call, demo, more info, or i can send a case study"
the stuff i wish i knew earlier
reply to some emails from your new inboxes before you start sending campaigns. like actually use them for a few days. forward yourself stuff, reply to newsletters, it helps with reputation
google postmaster tools is free and tells you your domain reputation. check it. if you see red flags stop and figure out whats wrong before you keep sending
lemwarm or instantly's warmup is fine but dont just set it and forget it. actually check if your warmup emails are landing in primary not spam
unsubscribes are not the enemy. an unsubscribe is infinitely better than a spam report. make it easy for people to opt out
tools i actually use day to day
- puzzleinbox — inboxes/domains
- smartlead — sending and sequences
- apollo + clay — leads and enrichment
- millionverifier — list cleaning
- mxtoolbox — DNS checks
- google postmaster — reputation monitoring
- chatgpt/claude — first draft of sequences then i heavily edit
thats pretty much it. nothing revolutionary, its all just consistency and not cutting corners on the boring parts.
if you're landing in spam 9 times out of 10 its either your domain reputation, a dirty list, or your emails look too much like marketing emails. fix those three things first before you mess with anything else
happy to answer questions, ive probably made every mistake in here at some point