r/coldemail

we were running cold email for a few months. Decent copy, solid sending infrastructure, good deliverability setup. Replies were trash. kept blaming the copy. Rewrote sequences 3 or 4 times... still nothing.
Eventually figured out the problem wasn't the copy. It was the list. We were just emailing people who had zero reason to care right now.

so we switched. instead of pulling static lists, we started building lists based on signals

same copy. same infrastructure. reply rate went up 4x in the first 2-3 weeks weeks

The difference is timing. Emailing someone who just posted a job for an SDR is a completely different conversation than emailing someone from a list that got scraped 6 months ago. most people optimize copy first. timing and relevance matter way more

Running growth at a B2B SaaS and LinkedIn is our main prospecting source. We export lists from Sales Navigator and enrich them but phone coverage is still our weak point. Tried a few Chrome extensions directly on profiles but results are inconsistent and I'm not sure how these tools are actually getting the data in the first place, whether it's scraping LinkedIn directly, pulling from third-party databases, or doing real-time lookups from other public sources, idk

Have you insights on this ?

I have a targeted list of 2,000 emails and phone numbers.

What's the best tool out there today to remove any bad emails before I start sending?

This was last year, before I had language for what I was doing.

I was running a LinkedIn agency and had just started experimenting with a weird new way to find prospects. Instead of filtering by job title and company size like everyone else, I was watching who engaged with what. Who commented on which posts. Who liked which competitors. Then reaching out to those people specifically.

Sent a cold email to a founder based on that. Opened with something specific about a post he'd engaged with two days prior. Two hours later he replied: "how did you find me."

My brain offered three reply options:

1. Lie
2. Ghost him
3. Tell the truth and sound like I'd been reading his diary

The truth felt genuinely creepy. I didn't have a clean way to explain it yet. "I watched you engage with a post about X, inferred you were thinking about that problem, and decided to reach out" sounded weird in my head (at least back then).

I went with option 3 anyway and he replied 20 minutes later: "That's actually impressive. Let's talk."

He became a customer.

Hi, people i helped i client while back with an email campaign, for sending 5k emails a day.

project is closed and i own all the assets, like domains, warmed up emails, and a lifetime reachinbox plan,

is there anyway i can make most out of it , or should i end up rent or sell the package?

Thanks

p.s - happy to help people with good offers looking to scale ( pure commission basis )

I know it’s from case to case, but saturation is so high every message I receive just blends in same AI pattern with no substance. What’s your experience?

I sent almost 400+ emails last time, with 0 deals closed. I'm going to do it once again and see what result it brings me.

This time I'm not tracking using MailTrack (I'm thinking it was probably making my emails go in spam). Personalized emails for everybody, lead list scrapped from google maps.

No professional email, no automated workflows.

Leave tips on what I should do to at least close 1 client this time.

Not intent data. Not LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Not scraping job postings.

I check if a company is actively running paid ads right now. That's it.

If they're spending money on Meta, Google, or LinkedIn ads in the last 30 days, I already know three things about them before I ever pick up the phone:

• They have budget
• Someone internally is under pressure to hit growth numbers
• There's a decision-maker actively approving spend every week

I reach out referencing their actual ads. Not "I noticed your company might benefit from..." — I say "You're running about 40 creatives across Meta and Google right now, are you happy with your cost per lead on those?"

Reply rate went from 2% to 11%.

The companies that are spending money right now are the ones most likely to spend money with you. Everyone else is chasing companies that Googled a keyword once.

Happy to break down the exact workflow if anyone's interested.

Hey all, I’m just starting to get into cold email and trying to figure out the best way to set things up without overdoing it.

One thing I’m stuck on is whether I should use a custom domain email from the start, or if a regular Gmail account is fine in the beginning. I get that a domain looks more legit, but I’m more curious about the actual impact like deliverability and replies.

I’ve seen people argue both sides, so not sure what really matters when you’re just getting started.

I did notice some hosting options like Bisup Web Hosting include domain email, so setting it up isn’t too expensive. I'm just unsure if it’s worth doing right away.

Would love to hear what’s worked for you guys, especially in the early stages.

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Hey guys, I'm pretty new to cold emailing and need some advice.

I've been using instantly.ai and sorta giving up on the concept of cold emailing in general...

I run a 3d lrinting business and wish to reach larger firms or contract opportunities.

Do you guys have any tips upon startup and which templates find you success the most?

Im also scraping from the Google API

I have seen mixed advice on this, some people keep warmup running in the background even after campaigns go live, while other stop it once sending starts.

In my currently testing both approaches to see what keeps inbox health more stable long term.

What's been working better for you?

not just sending, but overall reliability, deliverability, and ease of use.

feels like there are way too many options and everyone claims theirs is the best, so curious what’s actually working for people in real campaigns.

Hi, I'm the founder of Orderinboxes.com . We're currently looking for (ideally) agencies sending more than 50K emails per month. Individuals are fine too.

Our infrastructure is built on top of Azure. We're already natively integrated with Smartlead and Woodpecker and cheaper than the big guys InboxKit and ZapMail, with no setup fees and no bloated pricing.

Starting from $30/mo you can send 1250 emails per day from the same Azure infra. Sequencer included.

Right now we're running a promo: sign up and get 50 Azure boxes for life, free. No catch.

We've already processed around a million emails since last month, averaging 60%+ open rates on fresh domains without any warmup regardless of list or copy quality.

Now we're looking for super-senders to push the limits of our platform. DM me for more info or just ask away. Happy to answer.

I'm genuinely curious - what’s the hardest part of cold email for you?

Is it sourcing leads, verifying emails, writing copy that actually converts, or something else?

And if you're an agency owner - is it client delivery? Managing multiple ICPs? Keeping results consistent at scale?

Let me know

We use ICYPEAS as one of our primary data enrichment tools.

They have recently Sunset their Sales Nav extension we used to export Sales Nav lists to ICYPEAS where they could perform enrichment.

What is the most cost effective way to scrape leads now that they have sunset their extension.

Have tried Clay and Freckle tables with ICYPEAS as HTTP API for enrichment but the credits are costly.

Even Vayne or EvaBoot are costly (since it was free before)

Need about 10K contacts a month.

We have Heyreach as our LinkedIN tool but it doesn't scrape company URL which is required by ICYPEAS for enrichment.

Working as a freelance VA, I’ve been around clients who’ve tried both setups, and what stood out to me is that it’s rarely about which option is better.

Some clients already had a clear direction, targeting, and messaging. When that’s in place, bringing in the right support, whether it’s an agency or a VA, tends to work because there’s something to build on.

Other times, they’re still figuring things out. No clear audience, no structure, just the goal of getting leads. In those situations, it usually takes a bit more time to dial things in before anything really starts working.

What I’ve learned from seeing both sides is that it really comes down to what the business needs at that stage, not the label of who you bring in.

I saw many people complaining about this tool in reviews. Some say it is a good deal; I don't know why I chose this or not. Before this, I used my Python script to send emails, but that was slow, had many spam, and lacked proper tracking and all that stuff. I also want to ask, do you not feel instantly charged high? One more thing, my fellow told me I can only access this on the website and that it is not mobile-friendly, and their email database is old, not updated. Is that also true?

I am a little new to cold emailing. Can you guide me on what features platforms like these must have so I can able to pick the best one!

A few weeks ago, I warmed up several dozen mailboxes — purchased directly from Google Workspace — using one of the well-known warmup platforms (you know the duo). After four weeks, the dashboard showed a 100% inbox rate. So I ran my own test, sending to my personal Gmail accounts. A lot of the emails landed in spam.

Confused, I tested several accounts on EmailGuard. Most were sitting around 50% deliverability.

I posted here asking for help. The advice was clear: ditch the automated warmup and warm them up manually. I did — painfully — and after one to two weeks, deliverability climbed back toward 100%.

Since then, I've seen the same story pop up on this sub more than a few times.

That experience got me rethinking the whole warmup industry. Cold email tooling is fundamentally built for agencies. At agency scale, you can afford premium services, premium IP pools, and the deliverability that comes with them. Anyone running one to a few dozen mailboxes — solo founders, small teams, indie senders — falls into a gap where existing tools have cracks everywhere.

For senders in that gap, I think peer-to-peer warmup matters. And not the P2P you're probably thinking of — I mean warmup driven by real user behavior, not bots talking to bots.

Here's the part I keep coming back to: most "premium" warmup services aren't really premium. At best they mimic conversational threads, but we don't actually know whether Google or Microsoft inspects content — and both have been quietly tightening spam detection year over year while warmup tools have barely changed. Worse, every one of them sends via API or SMTP, which providers can detect directly. Real humans don't send their email through API or SMTP.

So what would a genuinely premium warmup look like? Web-based activity. Residential or business IPs. A limited number of accounts per IP. Only web-based P2P checks all three boxes.

That's why I built ThawingFox — a browser extension that does P2P warmup through the actual Gmail and Outlook web interfaces. It automates the tedious parts (sending, reading, replying, pulling from spam) so you can either warm up your own mailboxes or join the P2P network and warm up with other real users.

The extension is just the tool. The bigger goal is a community of senders who care about deliverability and want to help each other get there.

30-second demo on the landing page: https://thawingfox.com Discord (extended trial + find warmup buddies): https://discord.gg/kmNc5GTp

what’s the minimum setup you believe is necessary before running cold email properly

is it just gmail and manual sending, basic domain setup with warmup, or a full stack with tracking and validation

i’ve seen people get stuck for weeks just because they start testing messaging without clean data or a proper system, so now i’m wondering where people draw the line between good enough to start and too early to scale

what’s your take?