r/Coldemailing

This platform is an absolute joke. They'll gladly take your monthly payment but the second you cancel you cannot access anything, including past invoices, or any data that is rightfully YOURS. That includes domains. We purchased an extremely valuable domain with them which now cannot be transferred anywhere and is completely locked into Instantly.ai's platform.

Their customer support doesn't give two shits about you. They're rude, combative, and just wants you to get lost now that you're no longer a paying customer.

Can I make cold email outreach with gmail?

I recently started selling websites to small businesses and have been doing cold email outreach for about a week.

Right now I'm sending emails from a regular Gmail account because I genuinely can't afford to buy a domain yet.

Is it still possible to get clients this way, or is a custom domain basically required for cold outreach?

I'm not looking for the perfect setup—I just want to know if I should keep going with Gmail until I make my first sale, or if using Gmail is likely to hurt my chances too much.

I'd appreciate any advice from people who started with little or no budget.

Tyring to avoid buying 10 from google directly, been looking around for resellers and stuff but not too sure about deliverability and quality. Anyone have any success from resellers?

Hey everyone,

I'm starting to cold email businesses to offer Google Ads management (mainly service-based businesses and ecom), plus some white labeling for agencies. Problem is, I don't have a website or any case studies to point to yet just experience from past roles. I do not have an issue doing free work for now fyi.

I'm thinking about offering free work upfront (like a free audit, or even managing a small campaign for free for a set period) just to get my foot in the door and build some real case studies/testimonials I can use going forward.

Has anyone here done this successfully? A few questions:

• Does free work actually convert into paid retainers, or does it just attract people who never intend to pay?
• Should I cap it at something specific (e.g., "free for 30 days" or "free audit only") instead of open-ended free management?
• Any tips on how to position this in a cold email so it doesn't come off as desperate or lower my perceived value?
• Would white labeling for other agencies be a better way to get case studies than direct client work, since I'd have their oversight?

Appreciate any advice from people who've been through the "no portfolio yet" phase

Hey!!

I am new to cold emailing and am setting everything up now. I was curious if anyone knows the answer to this.

If I were to only send say 10-15 campaign emails per inbox and have each box send 30-35 warmup emails (all being opened) totaling 40-50 emails per box, would that help to make the boxes last for months or even potentially years before being burnt?

Thanks in advance

Hi folks,

I'm a technical founder, have recently launched a product, and am trying to scale up my marketing operation. While I've got decades worth of technical knowledge, my marketing chops are still junior. Also my time and resources are somewhat limited for this endeavour, right now.

To get the most leverage, I scraped a few thousand leads off of an online directory, verified and cleaned them up as best I could, set up a marketing domain to preserve reputation ("getx.com", where "x.com" is my main domain), set up the proper DNS records, got a bunch of Zoho inboxes, and threw them into Instantly for warmup. Was feeling pretty accomplished at that time.

You can sense the 'but", and here it comes: I didn't wait long enough to warm them up, didn't apply spintax, and then saw my deliverability plummet, followed by a Zoho ban due to a ToS violation. I'm a bit at a loss now. I guess my domain is burnt now, time and money wasted.

For those of you who did it right: how did you do it? Which tools and runbook did you use?

Much obliged.

Many tools, platforms, and suggestions are available.

However, my instincts tell me I’ll realize after months of spending money which ones have all the necessary features.

I want to ask rather than wasting time.

Note: I am from software engineering background, parked my degree and now starting new journey as entrepreneur. Realized, I tried building my own tool but realized I should not invent the wheel.

If you would be starting fresh which platform or tool you would recommend or you found working for you? for cold outreach.

Much appreciated your advice.

I’m looking for feedback from people who have used both Apollo and Instantly for inbox warm-up and outbound campaigns.

I used Apollo for about a year to warm up inboxes and run email campaigns. After building up a decent dataset there, I decided to start warming up some new inboxes in Instantly and test campaigns from there.

One of the first things I noticed is that some of Instantly’s own warm-up emails are already landing in spam in Gmail.
Isn’t that a pretty bad signal?

My thinking is: if the platform’s warm-up emails themselves are not reliably landing in the inbox, doesn’t that suggest the mailbox/domain reputation is already struggling, or that the warm-up network quality may be questionable?

The other thing I noticed is the sending pattern. Apollo warm-up emails seem to be scattered naturally throughout the day. Instantly warm-up emails, at least in my inboxes so far, seem more clustered around specific times of the day/week. That also feels odd to me because I would expect warm-up activity to mimic natural sending and receiving patterns, not come in noticeable bursts.

I didn’t really see either issue with Apollo. With Apollo, the warm-up emails generally seemed to hit the inbox consistently in Gmail, and the timing pattern looked more distributed.

The flip side is that Apollo’s warm-up has its own issue: Apollo support confirmed that their warm-up emails are sent through Apollo’s own infrastructure rather than directly from the connected mailboxes. In my case, that seems to create SPF/spoofing-type problems with Microsoft 365 recipients, even though the connected inboxes themselves are on Google Workspace.

So I’m trying to understand how others think about this tradeoff:

If Instantly warm-up emails are landing in Gmail spam, is that a serious red flag or just normal early warm-up behavior?

Has anyone else seen Instantly warm-up emails go to spam at the beginning and then recover over time?

Have others noticed Instantly warm-up emails clustering around certain times rather than being evenly distributed?

Is Apollo’s warm-up actually better for Gmail inbox placement, despite the Microsoft 365/SPF issue?

Does the fact that Apollo warm-up does not send directly from the connected mailbox make the warm-up less useful as a signal?

For people running serious outbound, do you trust platform warm-up at all anymore, or are you mostly relying on clean infrastructure, gradual sending patterns, manual engagement, and campaign quality?

Hello, so I am looking to get into cold emailing and I have tried it before and it seems like I missed a huge step which was verification of emails which made my emails bounce and deliverability wasn't there.

So now I have tweaked my business to a web agency but in the near future would go into lead generating service since I am good with automation and one of my first companies I worked for actually did cold email. So I am very familiar with how to build the overall workflow.

But I need help with what are the things I should look out for? Like how do I check if my emails are getting delivered and not landing on spam? How do I check if my overall domain reputation is good enough? How do I make sure I write a good copy?

So these are the things I am looking to get advice on. Currently I have 5 domains and 10 inboxes Gmail inboxes. Now I have given them for warmup and I will be using manyreach to send the emails so could you guys give me some suggestions regarding my questions because I want to start on the right foot

Hi, so I posted earlier but I think this would be a separate topic. So I want to know that a lot of people and AI give me different suggestions from time to time on how many inboxes I should use on one domain.

Also want to know what is a healthy amount of emails per inbox since if you guys have some practical experience on that would love to hear it since I know there are a lot of people who are doing cold email and I want to know from practical experience what is a safe range and it would be better if you gave me a fixed number as well.

Hi everyone. I have no frame of reference for how much this should cost and if it is expensive or not. Gemini said it is not but would like this groups opinion. Here is what they are going to do for me:

• We work together to define your ICP - typically the job titles, industries, and regions that match your best-fit clients.
• From there, we build 4,000 targeted prospects per month that match this ICP.
• Our team writes a 3-step cold email sequence, tailored to your offer and tone (we send around 12,000 emails per month using 24 warmed inboxes, all managed and maintained by us).
• All replies are forwarded directly to you, so you can jump straight in to pick up the lead.
• We normally see 2–5% reply rates, which equates to roughly 80-200 new conversations per month.

We work on a weekly model with a four week minimum ($400 per week), and you can cancel at anytime, so it puts pressure on us to deliver.

They have not been high pressure and have been pleasant to deal with so far. Also is there anything specific I should ask or any red flags that anyone sees?

Appreciate the feedback!

I'm planning to start cold emailing. I already have the infrastructure, the sending tools, domains, etc. Now it's time to actually start sending.

The biggest question i have is, where the hell do people get their lead emails?

Everyone says Apollo, sassydb, etc., but they're expensive as hell, apollo, for example, only gives you around 4k emails for $99, eanwhile, every youtube video claims they're sending 100k+ emails per month.

So... is everyone lying, or what's actually going on? Is there some secret that people in email marketing don't talk about?

P.S. I'll personally kiss whoever explains how people actually do this properly 😂

Hi there,

I have a Web design agency and we sell websites to local businesses in the US, I recently thought of starting cold email campaigns but I’m currently struggling with building the target list.

So my initial thought was that blasting 1000 emails to generic info@ or contact@ would not be a good idea unless that particular business is a 1-3 people operation or I might be wrong.

But what about bigger companies? How do you find the decision makers email address and then make sure that this is the destination that your email should land at.

I also read a lot of posts for people are complaining about the inaccuracy of databases of platforms like Apollo, Apify etc

Another thing is that I’ve tried cold calling and my opener line was that if I were talking to the owner, if not I was asking them to transfer to the owner or directing manager and a lot of receptionists declined

So I would highly appreciate if you can share your thoughts and experiences

Best,

Have been a long-time lurker but need some help now.

I have been cold emailing for 3 years from Gmails & very few private domains.

But since mid-June, all my emails have started going to spam.

I don't mail more than 5 to 6 per ID.

These IDs have been on warmup for years. Also, not every ID is used daily.

I spin my mails completely on the sentence structure level. Even the seed message is extremely unique.

Still landing in spam.

Warmup score across these is 100%, and also generic emails manually sent are going to inbox.

Tried these things since june mid:

1. Switched to sending through SmartLead instead of manually. Still spam.
2. Turned off tracking pixel. Still going to spam.
3. Bought a few domains and started mailing through SmartLead in very little volume, like 3 to 4 per mailbox while in warmup. Still going to spam.

So my question is how can I fix the situation?

At my wit's end currently after trying numerous things.

Edit:
After june 12, I have sent roughly 800 mails over the days sticking to 4-6 mails per id.
I've received 8 auto-replies from these but no rejection and not an positive reply.
Out of these 800, around 150 were from private domains, in that 1 auto reply had come.

Does it mark the email as spam? Would love to have the best practices if any. Thanks

I need to warn anyone here who is looking for a cold email infrastructure vendor right now. Stay far away from PuzzleInbox.

I bought a bunch of inboxes from them to run my campaigns through Instantly. Recently, Instantly’s automated system paused the warmup on several of my inboxes to protect my sender reputation. This is totally standard. To reactivate the warmup, Instantly sends a simple verification code to those specific email addresses.

Here is where the scam starts:

PuzzleInbox refuses to give you direct login access to the inboxes you pay for.

When I reached out to their support to simply ask them to use their Microsoft 365 Admin privileges (like Message Trace) to grab the codes for me, they flat out refused. They told me to go complain to Instantly. Instantly, obviously, told me they can't bypass their security protocol without the code.

So I am stuck in a Catch-22 with dead inboxes. I literally cannot maintain my own infrastructure because PuzzleInbox locks me out of my own accounts and refuses to provide basic admin support.

They are happy to take your monthly fee, but the second your accounts naturally disconnect from a warmup pool, the inboxes become 100% useless garbage. You are basically paying them to hold your domains hostage. Oh, and good luck canceling, because they hide their cancellation process behind a WhatsApp message instead of a normal dashboard.

Save yourself the headache and your money. Buy your own Google Workspaces, use a vendor that actually gives you the admin keys, or just use Instantly’s Done-For-You setup. PuzzleInbox is a trap.

my open rates completely tanked last month and my agency outreach is barely scraping by right now. i have been trying to scale but doing everything manually is just taking way too much time. i want to build a proper multichannel sequence to fix this but i am totally lost on the technical side. for those of you doing this successfully what exactly does your tech stack look like. do you use separate platforms for finding leads and sending messages or do you prefer an all in one solution. i just need something that actually keeps me out of the spam folder and saves me a few hours a week

I’m 19 building a SaaS right now. We haven’t launched publicly yet, but we’re already at around $500 MRR from beta/design partners. We’ve posted a bit on Reddit and Twitter, generated around 20k views, and ended up getting more beta user requests than we could actually take on, so I decided to start marketing a waitlist.

The product is basically an SEO agent for SaaS founders. It does a lot of the technical SEO/content work in the background instead of just spitting out generic AI blogs. The main wedge is that we’re building automated GitHub integration, so the agent can go from SERP analysis → content opportunity → draft → founder review → GitHub PR/publishing flow. The best part is that the whole thing is email-native. Founders can review drafts, answer questions, approve changes, and stay in the loop without having to constantly log into another dashboard.

We’re launching publicly in about 3 weeks and I want to run a cold email campaign before then to grow the waitlist and hopefully bring in more early customers.

I’m looking for someone who’s good at cold email but maybe still early as an agency/freelancer and wants a real SaaS case study. I’d be willing to pay per conversion, and I’d work heavily with you on the campaign, messaging, targeting, feedback, everything.

Also, I plan on running the cold email strategy by offering a free, fairly sophisticated SEO audit that when clicked on will have a waitlist conversion CTA there. I think the waitlist conversion rate should be a lot higher than just blasting generic cold emails (open to more ideas with waitlist strategy).

Not trying to be cheap. I’m bootstrapping, so I have to be smart with cash, but I also know how hard it is to get your first few real clients when you’re starting out. I think this could be a solid win-win if you’re hungry and actually good at outbound.

If this sounds interesting, comment or DM me with what you’ve done and how you’d approach it.