A definition of spam includes unsolicited bulk mail. I know it's a very lax definition, but I get a tingly spidery sense this cold email handbook is describing how to send unsolicited mails, in bulk.
Is it just me? I mean sure, it says how to do spf, dkim, dmarc, so it's not unidentified. But as a future recipient I think I'd be filing these into spam, come what may.
Also, this type of messaging applies to more than just spam. Even recruiters or startup founders trying to reach candidates could learn from this on how to write effective cold emails so candidates open and engage.
This read in my mind as "it's not spam if I do it" every single one of recruiters and start ups seeking funds could appear in my inbox, unwanted, and be filed by me as spam.
If I want these mails, I subscribe. This article is about cold mails. I don't think it's cold mail, if I subscribe is it?
The advice is good, but I'm not sensing a strong rebuttal here.
I've gotten some interesting jobs/contracts via recruiters that send cold outreach so I've definitely seen the beneficial aspect of it. Everyone is trying to make a buck; it's hardly any work to delete an email or unsubscribe.
this is 100% spam. i absolutely hate the people who perpetrate this.
> "There are few growth levers that could allow a single person to grow a startup from $0 to $1M ARR in a matter of months. [...] Cold outbound is one such lever."
ugh... attempt to rebrand spam as cold outbound...
of course it can grow your ARR by $1M. or $1B with this one simple trick...
note that these schemes often seem to work incredibly well in the anecdotes of the people making money selling you these schemes [1].
in actuality it's just a spam service that will, at best, annoy and aggravate your future potential customers, but mostly just end up in the spam folder. making the internet an even worse place than it already is to the benefit of no-one. well maybe za-zu.com.
[1] https://www.za-zu.com/ "Built by the makers of Clay and Aurora. 10x leads, replies, and revenue like an army of the world's best sales reps—without actually needing an army."
This is the perfect 101 for a YC founder looking to begin outbound sales.
Would have liked a more detailed expansion on how to use AI to personalise content to drive results. I'm sure there's a lot of black magic out there with practitioners not revealing to maintain an alpha on the rest of us mortals.
One winter, it was snowing real bad where I was living. So I sent my landlord an email complaining about how the heating was malfunctioning. At first he wouldn't budge, even as I decried the cruelty of his cold, cold heart.
Well, after more repeated nagging, he relented and fixed the heating!
I've been receiving hundreds of these emails per day, and they were hard to filter due to them being ChatGPT generated (also in native language/s).
But I started my own spam filter that filters out the rotating networks of those companies, due to them having multiple ASNs and multiple load balancers that they rotate on a daily basis to avoid being filtered by e.g. spamhaus.
If they use a public email service and fake gmail addresses, they are blocked via domain due to gmail itself stripping out the relay trace of IPs :( other than that my inboxes are now super clean and I love it.
If you don't want this type of spam, or if you want to give me spam samples to filter out, this is the repository:
Yeah, I also found that very ironic. And the amount of detail it goes into on spam and abuse detection systems before shamelessly telling you how to get around them. I kinda have to respect how blunt it is, honestly.
There is a lot of great content here though I worry some of it is quickly becoming outdated. Every three months google has been updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder deliver sales emails at scale.
As evidence of this, look at Rift.com a YC/Sequoia-backed sales email tool that closely followed this same playbook but was forced to kill their service as Google made it increasingly difficult to deliver sales messages at scale.
Conversion rates use to be 1-10% from email to meeting booking. Now I believe most teams are seeing significantly below 1%.
Maybe partly because everyone wants to "meet" or "have a quick chat" now. Used to be novel if they just wanted to chat not straight sell. Now we've wised up
I'm in the position of needing to do a lot of outreach to find our first customers. If this is actually what I have to do, I refuse. I'm sure there's some good advice in here, but most of it seems gross. I don't want to send "Personalized Outbound at Scale".
You're just communicating your offering directly to people that may be interested. I don't see why that's gross. It's not deceptive or manipulative. There's a cost to search and sometimes targeted offerings that come directly can be very helpful.
Direct outreach is pretty much the only way to get your initial customers. If you have warm connections, use those, sure. But those can be a false signal as warm connections tend to talk to you or feign interest just to be nice. A cold contact owes you nothing, so if they do take the meeting or engage in your product, that's a lot stronger signal.
Anyone have a business they built without using direct cold outreach? Would love to hear alternatives
> You're just communicating your offering directly to people that may be interested.
I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
I imagine the worthless specimens sending these emails have intricately woven strands of faecal material in their cell nuclei instead of DNA.
> Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit this group? Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit?
> I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Right, but the people who sent those mails -- what reason do they have to think that you're interested in <checks spam folder> orthapedic multizone mattresses, Microsoft teams room equipment, or a talk about Amber Engebreston's transition from Supply Chain Manager at Chipotle to her current role?
(OK, that last one was a weird.)
If, on the other hand, you've posted a job opening for someone to do direct marketing, there's a good chance your company sends cold emails; in which case, maybe you'd like to outsource some of that work to make it more effective.
The thing I dislike about spam is the offloading of filtering from them to me. But if someone has actually put in effort to figure out what I personally might actually want, I'm a lot more willing to take a look.
I'm not opposed to cold outreach, we've done that plenty, though without much success. I'm opposed at the scale where I need to have "warming tools" for my email address. It's very possible that it makes me a bad founder, though.
Just cold emailing for companies that might be interested in us. No replies. My cofounder did some research on what best to do for cold outreach and did end up getting some replies, after. I have better luck talking to people in person at networking/industry events (or messaging relevant people via HN connections). We'll go back to emailing at some point.
Yeah, "Try to make sure the person you're emailing is experiencing pain that your service relieves" is good, and if every cold email I got was that targeted I wouldn't mind at all.
"Use a VPN and inbox warming techniques to hide from Gmail the fact that you're doing bulk emailing" is pretty scummy.
Someone (a mark?) getting through the filtering (sales?) funnel's first stage is a strong signal for what? That someone period is interested in your product/service you're offering? Or that this particular person, the one who reaches the second stage of the funnel, is a possible lead (or exactly a lead)? Likely the latter.
Because you can skip the scientific/investigative validation of the hypothesis that there is someone that wants what you offer/sell/provide. That is, you should assume that there is someone out there (a small number of people at least, really) that wants to pay you for what you provide. I know this goes against common startup wisdom. But there's a massive cold outreach campaign type that needs to function and it needs to function with some confident assumptions within its technological engineering implementation. I guess.
I'm just speculating on some theoretical startup founding that doesn't suck.
Deliberately circumventing email security controls, automation detection, and abuse prevention systems of email service providers constitutes a violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1030 (the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act). When done as part of a business operation with intent and at scale, this behavior meets the criminal threshold of intentionally accessing protected computer systems without or in excess of authorization and impairing their integrity and availability. Anti-abuse mechanisms are security controls under CFAA. Knowingly subverting them is criminal, not civil.
I don’t know who runs “za-zu.com”, but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies who are working with Google and others major email services ongoingly to locate and take down spamming groups.
Yes, there have been notable CFAA prosecutions involving spamming activities. One significant case involved Power Ventures, which faced prosecution for both CFAA and CAN-SPAM violations. The company was sued by Facebook for sending promotional emails and messages through Facebook's platform without authorization[5][6].
The Department of Justice has recently revised its CFAA prosecution policies, particularly following significant court decisions that have narrowed the statute's interpretation. The DOJ now focuses on more clear-cut violations rather than mere terms of service violations[2][4].
For CFAA prosecution to proceed today, prosecutors must typically demonstrate that:
- The defendant was aware of specific access restrictions
- There were clear technological measures attempting to prevent unauthorized access
- The defendant knowingly circumvented these measures[4]
The cold email handbook clearly demonstrates how to circumvent Gmail’s limitations and the author is clearly aware that doing so violates their terms of service. So I would argue they are at risk of being prosecuted.
And as someone who runs a large email filtering service, I can tell you with some authority and confidence that the industry really loves helping law enforcement go after these groups.
> [...] but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies [...]
I wonder if I'm oblivious to some kind of sarcasm in your comment, because if I take what's written at face value, it sounds like you advocate for not getting caught in favour of not actually doing the criminal thing.
I’m not implying that. I’m hopeful they’ll take down their handbook so that others don’t follow in their footsteps. I also wish for their business to cease operating.
Because y'all have ruined our inboxes. It used to be a place for things I actually wanted to read. Now it's a chore. Even when I try to let as little through as possible... It's all garbage. Bills, spam, and omg your server is blowing up right now alerts.
The vast majority of commenters are being negative about this essay, and I agree with the negativity, because _automated cold emails_ are awful. (As are sequences, and mail merges.)
However!
_Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/lost art. I want to give an example of two cold emails that I (manually!) send a few times a month. (I run Buttondown, which is an email SaaS — think similar to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)
---
The first is to folks who have the following criteria:
1. they hit the front page of HN
2. they have a personal blog that isn't tied to a platform (e.g. they're using jekyll or something similar)
3. they have RSS enabled
4. they do _not_ collect email addresses
The thrust of the email is this:
```
Hi! I'm the founder of Buttondown, a newsletter tool for technical blogs. I'm reaching out because:
1. You just hit HN front page! (Congrats and/or my condolences.)
2. You've got an RSS feed but are not capturing emails.
My proposal: I set you up with a free (for life!) Buttondown account seeded with your blog's RSS feed. All you do is drop in a form tag or an iFrame in your blog and folks can sign up with their email address and get an email whenever you publish something new. I can handle the setup and then hand it off to you for perpetuity.
If this is something you're at all interested in, please let me know! (There's no catch, and this isn't an automated email, so please — I'd love to hear why not, even if the answer is simply "shove off, I don't care about collecting an audience, Twitter and Mastodon are sufficient").
```
(I tweak the language based on their own voice, mention what in particular I like about their blog, etc.)
---
The second is to folks who fit the following criteria:
1. they're a technical newsletter publishing programming-related content
2. they're using a platform that I know to be particularly expensive relative to me (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign are the two big culprits here)
```
hi there! I run Buttondown — you may have heard of us, we're used by RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_1 and RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_2. I see you're using OTHER_PLATFORM; is there anything I could do to get you to switch to [us](https://buttondown.com/pricing?count=7500)
(btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign. it's still early days for us, so tbh you telling me why you're _not_ interested is just as valuable as getting to call you a customer :)
```
Small sample size for both genres — I've probably sent them a total of ~fifty times — but the response rate is around 80% and conversion rate (though granted for the first genre "conversion" is more of a second-order effect, since I'm offering them a free account!) is ~25%.
I say all of this because, as someone who a priori _hated_ outbound and "sales stuff", I learned that at least for me and my business both the most palatable _and_ most effective method was just being earnest and helpful. It has been the single most useful non-technical skill I've gained over the past few years.
I think the definition of spam necessitates some level of bulk sending, and I struggle to consider ~fifty emails over the course of two or three years "bulk".
So if the same qualitative factors were kept for your outreach, just an increase in the quantitative equation means it's spam? One discrete instance is not spam but the combination of all of them makes the whole spam, when certain thresholds are reached? If so, how do we define those thresholds?
I'm quite sure you can do all sorts of mental gymnastics to avoid thinking of yourself as a spammer.
Here's my basic criteria for spam:
1. It's unsolicited.
2. It's trying to sell something / exploit people.
In my grading scale I classify you as a spammer. A "bespoke" spammer perhaps, but I still do not want to waste time reading anything you send me, or waste time even clicking "mark as spam", unless I ask for it. You would be stealing my mental CPU cycles (which are few and precious).
No. I'm drawing a distinction between “I want to sell you something” and “click this link to a website that strongly resembles, but is not, YourBank to transfer all your money to us.”
I remember an old boss launching a product this way - he read the spam law and while I don't remember the specifics, sending an unsolicited email to people whose emails you obtained legitimately was okay if you weren't explicitly selling something (which I think is very open to interpretation).
Oh, it’s absolutely spam, by definition. That said, that’s a wide spectrum. I don’t generally like TV ads, but the State Farm ones with Patrick Maholmes and Andy Reid are funny and I don’t mind them. Kind of the same here: it’s spam, but if there was ever one that’d get a response from me, that would be it.
> Unsolicited commercial email -- "UCE," or "spam," in the online vernacular -- is any commercial electronic mail message sent, often in bulk, to a consumer without the consumer's prior request or consent.
It’s often in bulk, but needn’t be to meet the definition of Unsolicited Commercial Email, aka spam.
I’ll lay it on the line. In the many years I ran mailservers for a living and for a hobby, I was elbows deep in fighting spam. One of the consistent patterns over the years was that spammers would go to elaborate lengths to explain why their spam wasn’t spam. If it’s unsolicited commercial email, it’s spam.
Again, there’s a wide spectrum from v14gr4 p1ll5 to a legitimate vendor in my job space reaching out to me. They’re not all alike. But if it’s commercial, and unsolicited… it’s still spam.
I agree with you -- I don't like receiving cold emails on my work email address, and I treat such emails as spam. But I don't think it can be configured as spam from a law standpoint; but this is just my opinion, IANAL.
> Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.
That doesn’t specifically mention spam, but it does indicate how strictly regulators define what they consider to be commercial email. And if it’s unsolicited commercial email, i.e. UCE… it’s spam.
I'm so sad that this post is illustrated with stardew valley screenshots. I imagine this could be exactly the type of pain the protagonist lives everyday in the intro...
Let's not beat around the bush; mass cold emails are SPAM with another name.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.
At this point, I just assume anyone cold emailing me is seeking to extract information around my employer’s technical environment for malicious reasons. The questions they keep asking seem to indicate as much.
I’m reaching out as I want to learn more about the database technology you’re using, and if you’re having any problems with it. Such as scalability, performance, data siloing, costs, etc. We’re curious to hear from software engineers working with production databases.
I'm not sure what attack vector they're going to uncover from knowing the database you use, given there is a relatively small number of databases anyway—they're already in a position to guess (brute force) themselves into your system if just knowing the database was enough.
Maybe you think they are looking to get your guard down and then ask the juicier questions?
In this case I’d wager they’re just looking to sell to us. If they were malicious however, replying to the email would let the sender know about my position within the organization and how inclined I am to sharing information.
At the end of the day there’s no upside to either me nor my organization to respond to cold emails beyond politeness.
Its great, because it validates my new and innovative* principle of simply rejecting all mail of the [known]suffix.tld and prefix[known].tld sort. Not sure if microsoftstore.com was ever legitimately used for mail. Most of the other "wait thats a real company" cases were of the "but we don't want their mail anyway" sort.
*) Of course, the "new and innovative" part was a lie. Its old and dead simple. I had many years ago been inspired by a well known large online payment provider deliberately sabotaging full-domain-keyed antispam measures. As far as I can tell they have discontinued playing around with domains indistinguishable from common phishing. I am assuming because phishing got out of hand and it is difficult to blame customers for not knowing the difference between ads@legit-brand-secure.example versus ads@brand-secure-phish.example.
Most cold emails are terrible. However when done well it can lead to interesting results. Spam/scams is different from having a real product or service in which people you reach out to might be genuinely interested. By definition it doesn’t scale all that well. If what you send is truly great then you will stand out
I wonder how many of the detractors in this thread actually use cold email successfully and would have it in their best interests to badmouth it to reduce competition and hence effectiveness of the channel.
Cold emailing isn't very popular here, and in general I don't know anyone who likes receiving cold email. I don't think the problem is cold emailing, but the way it's done. Most cold email is irrelevant and not helpful.
Here's an example taken from this handbook:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Reason I'm reaching out is I run a cold outbound agency. We can send at 17x the volume of a typical SDR, and our emails are usually twice as effective. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist.
> Worth a chat this week?
> - Person Who Writes Better Emails
I actually get emails like these all the time and I mark them as spam. Because they're spam.
Instead of sending me this email, imagine instead I received some actual leads from this agency in the first email. Like just 3 companies that are a very qualified match:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Here's 3 qualified leads you might be interested in:
> Company 1 and why it's qualified
> Company 2 and why it's qualified
> Company 3 and why it's qualified
> Those leads have expressed interest in your service. I run a cold outbound agency. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist. Worth a chat this week?
Now that's helpful. I actually know this company could provide some value. Maybe I'll actually respond because I want some more.
Being relevant and very helpful is really hard to do at scale. You have to actually do some work to learn about the company, the person, and provide something tangible that's valuable. For some products/services, it might be possible to do at scale. Until then, it's really just spam by a different name.
The example email presumes the recipient who's getting it actually needs the service. I'd be happy if someone did free work for me. If you don't need the service, then yes it's irrelevant either way and effectively spam.
But maybe there's some other reason you think the free work or email is spam?
Oh please, are we at the point now where we're thinking that a selfless act (somebody giving you your lost wallet) is analogous to someone trying to make money by contacting you?
People are sick of it not just because it's "irrelevant*, but we're tired of being sold to every waking moment.
I am still sad at how this spammy article about spam has so many upvotes on HN.
Eh, I was with you until the wallet analogy. Returning somebody’s wallet is just a pure favor. The second email isn’t a favor really, it is still a pitch. It is a better pitch. But it is still a pitch.
Agreeableness and openness to new experiences are 2 of the 'Big 5' personality traits. Some people are very likely to see everything as an opportunity, assume positive intent, and want to give someone a chance. If one thing doesn't work out, it was one thing, and the next thing is completely different. I imagine cold emails work very very well with these people. Lots of these people exist.
I'm not on the same side of the spectrum for either of those traits. I usually see these things as a waste of time I didn't ask for. My own experience with sales people makes me distrustful of their intentions. If one thing doesn't work out, I think all the next things that look like it won't work either. Cold emails don't work for me; case studies, hands-off demos, etc. where I am researching you, I have approached you, and I feel like I am controlling the engagement with you, work better.
>> Agreeableness and openness to new experiences are 2 of the 'Big 5' personality traits. Some people are very likely to see everything as an opportunity, assume positive intent
I'm naturally introverted, but I actively overcompensate for it. Over a decade ago, i tried to open my mind to chance conversations. I'd engage in any conversation with anyone -- cafes, grocery stores, etc. Unfortunately I ended up just getting invited to MLM meetings and occasional proselytization. Folks doing the proselytization were actually genuinely friendly, though I wasn't interested in converting. The MLM folks were the worst.
Eventually, I ended up back where I started -- only taking random conversations at work or technical events or set social events (e.g., sports)
I think you’re right that personality traits could be a large factor to how someone perceives cold email skeptically and negatively. Some may be wary of it as a default and some may never allow themselves to be sold to no matter what.
That said, I think cold email is often abused (like any selling, promotion, or advertising can be) where many actors take it too far. This is another factor that I think gives cold email a bad perception by default. It’s just much easier to do things at scale and play the numbers game, so that’s what gets us here.
The first time I received one of these lead agency emails I was actually open to trying it and responded to it. After the thousandth time of receiving the same message, it goes to spam without a second thought.
> But maybe there's some other reason you think the free work or email is spam?
I don't know you and never asked you for what you consider free work (which is basically some stupid script fetching data). Your trash isn't free work for me, just someone trying to make easy money.
As a side note, most agreeable people trying to sell shit is a terribly rude buyer. If you don't believe me, start replying to cold emails selling something back to them. Even better, use a different email and send a cold email too.
Further, the free work is not free for me to take time to evaluate it. It’s asking me to give up precious chunks of schedule to research it. I have other priorities.
out of curiosity, how do you feel about cold emails asking for a conversation?
I am currently looking for a new job (potentially in a new industry), so I'm doing cold outreach to people whose experience seems relevant and/or interesting, asking for advice, and usually a phone call in which I can pick their brain
would you also view my emails as spam? if not, would you bother replying?
If you’re genuinely interested in a conversation, I think that’s different. If you’re reaching out to someone who you admire/‘know’, that’s you making an effort at a genuine human connection.
What I get are emails that say ‘I would love to write articles for your audience, please respond if you would like to see a sample.’ My site clearly doesn’t publish 3rd party articles. And if you were that keen, just send me the damned sample.
I always try to respond if I get an email in a personal capacity asking for advice and the person doesn't seem to be trying to sell me on something, scam me or otherwise ruin my day. Sometimes I'm a bit snowed under so it takes me a while to dig out my inbox and get to replying but I always try to.
In your specific example I wolud absolutely respond if someone needed a bit of help getting a job or whatever but I would be wary. I have had people pretend that is the case and then they are actually trying to sell me some offshore development team or whatever. So sadly I have to be a bit more guarded than I would normally like.
I’ve noticed that the new form of cold emails is inviting you to a podcast. I’ve gotten at least 5 of those in the past month, hosted by companies that just so happen to sell software or services that are relevant in our industry.
There are some parts that are useful without seeming too scummy - the bits on tone and how to actually write a good email, for instance. But the bulk of this is just an outright guide on how to spam.
I love this! Just signed up for your early access. All the material you write is spot on. We've had experiences with cold email and it works wonders, it is great to see someone tackling this head on.
The real problem is that Google Ads and Facebook Ads are 80% bots that just click and leave. If you track the behavior of ad clicks it looks super bot-like. Email and other mechanisms to read your human audience are massively necessary.
I didn't realize cold emails were a thing until I started my most recent job.
Our emails are first initial + last name @ business.com and I share the first initial and last name with someone in a different part of the company than me. Somehow I ended up with that email (no numbers) and I get emails constantly about stuff completely unrelated to what I work on. (He's a general manager at a large hotel property.)
I've even started getting invoices for the laundry at the hotel.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadRan into some of the issues called out in this post; "rookie" mistakes when starting up email campaigns.
Lives up to the playbook moniker.
Is it just me? I mean sure, it says how to do spf, dkim, dmarc, so it's not unidentified. But as a future recipient I think I'd be filing these into spam, come what may.
The section on tone is good, IMO.
Also, this type of messaging applies to more than just spam. Even recruiters or startup founders trying to reach candidates could learn from this on how to write effective cold emails so candidates open and engage.
If I want these mails, I subscribe. This article is about cold mails. I don't think it's cold mail, if I subscribe is it?
The advice is good, but I'm not sensing a strong rebuttal here.
> "There are few growth levers that could allow a single person to grow a startup from $0 to $1M ARR in a matter of months. [...] Cold outbound is one such lever."
ugh... attempt to rebrand spam as cold outbound...
of course it can grow your ARR by $1M. or $1B with this one simple trick...
note that these schemes often seem to work incredibly well in the anecdotes of the people making money selling you these schemes [1].
in actuality it's just a spam service that will, at best, annoy and aggravate your future potential customers, but mostly just end up in the spam folder. making the internet an even worse place than it already is to the benefit of no-one. well maybe za-zu.com.
[1] https://www.za-zu.com/ "Built by the makers of Clay and Aurora. 10x leads, replies, and revenue like an army of the world's best sales reps—without actually needing an army."
Would have liked a more detailed expansion on how to use AI to personalise content to drive results. I'm sure there's a lot of black magic out there with practitioners not revealing to maintain an alpha on the rest of us mortals.
The future is back to cold calling with a real-life human on the phone - until voice-to-voice LLMs commoditise that as well.
Then salespeople and founders with strong networks will thrive. You'll see a comeback to F2F meetings and dinners as people crave real connections.
Well, after more repeated nagging, he relented and fixed the heating!
But I started my own spam filter that filters out the rotating networks of those companies, due to them having multiple ASNs and multiple load balancers that they rotate on a daily basis to avoid being filtered by e.g. spamhaus.
If they use a public email service and fake gmail addresses, they are blocked via domain due to gmail itself stripping out the relay trace of IPs :( other than that my inboxes are now super clean and I love it.
If you don't want this type of spam, or if you want to give me spam samples to filter out, this is the repository:
https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam
> Email is still your own little corner of the internet.
I love that the author can say something like this and then provide a guide for ruining the last sane piece of the internet any of us have left.
2. See #1
As evidence of this, look at Rift.com a YC/Sequoia-backed sales email tool that closely followed this same playbook but was forced to kill their service as Google made it increasingly difficult to deliver sales messages at scale.
Conversion rates use to be 1-10% from email to meeting booking. Now I believe most teams are seeing significantly below 1%.
Good
That's a great definition for spam.
Direct outreach is pretty much the only way to get your initial customers. If you have warm connections, use those, sure. But those can be a false signal as warm connections tend to talk to you or feign interest just to be nice. A cold contact owes you nothing, so if they do take the meeting or engage in your product, that's a lot stronger signal.
Anyone have a business they built without using direct cold outreach? Would love to hear alternatives
I have a brimming spam folder full of people who are “just communicating their offering directly to people who may be interested.”
Sometimes these people are apparently elderly or alzheimers sufferers who don't have the cognitive ability to distinguish spam from official sources, and are easily exploitable.
I imagine the worthless specimens sending these emails have intricately woven strands of faecal material in their cell nuclei instead of DNA.
Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit this group? Is everyone who sends cold email seeking to exploit?
Clearly not. That is why the sentence begins with "Sometimes".
Right, but the people who sent those mails -- what reason do they have to think that you're interested in <checks spam folder> orthapedic multizone mattresses, Microsoft teams room equipment, or a talk about Amber Engebreston's transition from Supply Chain Manager at Chipotle to her current role?
(OK, that last one was a weird.)
If, on the other hand, you've posted a job opening for someone to do direct marketing, there's a good chance your company sends cold emails; in which case, maybe you'd like to outsource some of that work to make it more effective.
The thing I dislike about spam is the offloading of filtering from them to me. But if someone has actually put in effort to figure out what I personally might actually want, I'm a lot more willing to take a look.
What kind of campaign messaging? How did you define success? Were you getting no replies at all?
"Use a VPN and inbox warming techniques to hide from Gmail the fact that you're doing bulk emailing" is pretty scummy.
Because you can skip the scientific/investigative validation of the hypothesis that there is someone that wants what you offer/sell/provide. That is, you should assume that there is someone out there (a small number of people at least, really) that wants to pay you for what you provide. I know this goes against common startup wisdom. But there's a massive cold outreach campaign type that needs to function and it needs to function with some confident assumptions within its technological engineering implementation. I guess.
I'm just speculating on some theoretical startup founding that doesn't suck.
I don’t know who runs “za-zu.com”, but they may wish to take down their handbook lest they capture the interest of law enforcement agencies who are working with Google and others major email services ongoingly to locate and take down spamming groups.
The Department of Justice has recently revised its CFAA prosecution policies, particularly following significant court decisions that have narrowed the statute's interpretation. The DOJ now focuses on more clear-cut violations rather than mere terms of service violations[2][4].
For CFAA prosecution to proceed today, prosecutors must typically demonstrate that:
- The defendant was aware of specific access restrictions
- There were clear technological measures attempting to prevent unauthorized access
- The defendant knowingly circumvented these measures[4]
The cold email handbook clearly demonstrates how to circumvent Gmail’s limitations and the author is clearly aware that doing so violates their terms of service. So I would argue they are at risk of being prosecuted.
And as someone who runs a large email filtering service, I can tell you with some authority and confidence that the industry really loves helping law enforcement go after these groups.
Sources [1] CFAA Cases - NACDL https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases [2] Hacking the CFAA - Infosecurity Magazine https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/magazine-features/hack... [3] The Most Controversial Hacking Cases of the Past Decade - WIRED https://www.wired.com/2015/10/cfaa-computer-fraud-abuse-act-... [4] DOJ Revises Policy for CFAA Prosecution to Reflect Developments ... https://newmedialaw.proskauer.com/2022/05/24/doj-revises-pol... [5] Lessons from the Power Ventures Case Include “Terms of Use Can ... https://www.hoganlovells.com/en/publications/lessons-from-th... [6] 9th Circuit Weighs in on CFAA and CAN-SPAM - Cyber Report https://ilccyberreport.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/9th-cir-weig...
I wonder if I'm oblivious to some kind of sarcasm in your comment, because if I take what's written at face value, it sounds like you advocate for not getting caught in favour of not actually doing the criminal thing.
However!
_Bespoke cold emails_ are I think, a dying/lost art. I want to give an example of two cold emails that I (manually!) send a few times a month. (I run Buttondown, which is an email SaaS — think similar to Mailchimp, ConvertKit, etc.)
---
The first is to folks who have the following criteria:
1. they hit the front page of HN
2. they have a personal blog that isn't tied to a platform (e.g. they're using jekyll or something similar)
3. they have RSS enabled
4. they do _not_ collect email addresses
The thrust of the email is this:
``` Hi! I'm the founder of Buttondown, a newsletter tool for technical blogs. I'm reaching out because:
1. You just hit HN front page! (Congrats and/or my condolences.) 2. You've got an RSS feed but are not capturing emails.
My proposal: I set you up with a free (for life!) Buttondown account seeded with your blog's RSS feed. All you do is drop in a form tag or an iFrame in your blog and folks can sign up with their email address and get an email whenever you publish something new. I can handle the setup and then hand it off to you for perpetuity.
If this is something you're at all interested in, please let me know! (There's no catch, and this isn't an automated email, so please — I'd love to hear why not, even if the answer is simply "shove off, I don't care about collecting an audience, Twitter and Mastodon are sufficient"). ```
(I tweak the language based on their own voice, mention what in particular I like about their blog, etc.)
---
The second is to folks who fit the following criteria:
1. they're a technical newsletter publishing programming-related content
2. they're using a platform that I know to be particularly expensive relative to me (Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign are the two big culprits here)
``` hi there! I run Buttondown — you may have heard of us, we're used by RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_1 and RELEVANT_CUSTOMER_2. I see you're using OTHER_PLATFORM; is there anything I could do to get you to switch to [us](https://buttondown.com/pricing?count=7500)
(btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign. it's still early days for us, so tbh you telling me why you're _not_ interested is just as valuable as getting to call you a customer :) ```
Small sample size for both genres — I've probably sent them a total of ~fifty times — but the response rate is around 80% and conversion rate (though granted for the first genre "conversion" is more of a second-order effect, since I'm offering them a free account!) is ~25%.
I say all of this because, as someone who a priori _hated_ outbound and "sales stuff", I learned that at least for me and my business both the most palatable _and_ most effective method was just being earnest and helpful. It has been the single most useful non-technical skill I've gained over the past few years.
Here's my basic criteria for spam:
1. It's unsolicited.
2. It's trying to sell something / exploit people.
In my grading scale I classify you as a spammer. A "bespoke" spammer perhaps, but I still do not want to waste time reading anything you send me, or waste time even clicking "mark as spam", unless I ask for it. You would be stealing my mental CPU cycles (which are few and precious).
Are these synonymous?
The CAN-SPAM Act does not forbid explicitly selling something. Rather it requires an opt-out mechanism and identifiers for who the sender is.
By whose definition? Source?
> Unsolicited commercial email -- "UCE," or "spam," in the online vernacular -- is any commercial electronic mail message sent, often in bulk, to a consumer without the consumer's prior request or consent.
It’s often in bulk, but needn’t be to meet the definition of Unsolicited Commercial Email, aka spam.
That's the key. The FTC defines spam as something sent to a consumer; in this case, the receiver is not a consumer but a business.
Again, there’s a wide spectrum from v14gr4 p1ll5 to a legitimate vendor in my job space reaching out to me. They’re not all alike. But if it’s commercial, and unsolicited… it’s still spam.
> Despite its name, the CAN-SPAM Act doesn’t apply just to bulk email. It covers all commercial messages, which the law defines as “any electronic mail message the primary purpose of which is the commercial advertisement or promotion of a commercial product or service,” including email that promotes content on commercial websites. The law makes no exception for business-to-business email. That means all email – for example, a message to former customers announcing a new product line – must comply with the law.
That doesn’t specifically mention spam, but it does indicate how strictly regulators define what they consider to be commercial email. And if it’s unsolicited commercial email, i.e. UCE… it’s spam.
The author is advocating for nearly the opposite.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.
Maybe it's my ESL, but I honestly never really got the passive agressive tone from a phrase like that.
I'm completely with you on the "could you forward" part though, but it just makes me chuckle before hitting the "delete forever" button.
I guess the ESL part makes me read this literally and maybe have a passing thought in the vein of "I am not, so what".
Maybe you think they are looking to get your guard down and then ask the juicier questions?
At the end of the day there’s no upside to either me nor my organization to respond to cold emails beyond politeness.
You mean to any of the cold emails that you were sent already. You don't think it's possible for someone to send a cold email that could benefit you?
*) Of course, the "new and innovative" part was a lie. Its old and dead simple. I had many years ago been inspired by a well known large online payment provider deliberately sabotaging full-domain-keyed antispam measures. As far as I can tell they have discontinued playing around with domains indistinguishable from common phishing. I am assuming because phishing got out of hand and it is difficult to blame customers for not knowing the difference between ads@legit-brand-secure.example versus ads@brand-secure-phish.example.
Here's an example taken from this handbook:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Reason I'm reaching out is I run a cold outbound agency. We can send at 17x the volume of a typical SDR, and our emails are usually twice as effective. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist.
> Worth a chat this week?
> - Person Who Writes Better Emails
I actually get emails like these all the time and I mark them as spam. Because they're spam.
Instead of sending me this email, imagine instead I received some actual leads from this agency in the first email. Like just 3 companies that are a very qualified match:
> Hey Matt —-
> Friend of mine told me about Za-zu last week. Congrats on the recent raise.
> Random, but noticed you've got a few jobs open for SDRs.
> Here's 3 qualified leads you might be interested in:
> Company 1 and why it's qualified
> Company 2 and why it's qualified
> Company 3 and why it's qualified
> Those leads have expressed interest in your service. I run a cold outbound agency. Have generated $1B in pipeline for companies like Angellist. Worth a chat this week?
Now that's helpful. I actually know this company could provide some value. Maybe I'll actually respond because I want some more.
Being relevant and very helpful is really hard to do at scale. You have to actually do some work to learn about the company, the person, and provide something tangible that's valuable. For some products/services, it might be possible to do at scale. Until then, it's really just spam by a different name.
But maybe there's some other reason you think the free work or email is spam?
Is 'they are sending me a cold email' not enough?
I'd trust the content of a cold email even less than info from car salesmen if that were possible.
People are sick of it not just because it's "irrelevant*, but we're tired of being sold to every waking moment.
I am still sad at how this spammy article about spam has so many upvotes on HN.
Agreeableness and openness to new experiences are 2 of the 'Big 5' personality traits. Some people are very likely to see everything as an opportunity, assume positive intent, and want to give someone a chance. If one thing doesn't work out, it was one thing, and the next thing is completely different. I imagine cold emails work very very well with these people. Lots of these people exist.
I'm not on the same side of the spectrum for either of those traits. I usually see these things as a waste of time I didn't ask for. My own experience with sales people makes me distrustful of their intentions. If one thing doesn't work out, I think all the next things that look like it won't work either. Cold emails don't work for me; case studies, hands-off demos, etc. where I am researching you, I have approached you, and I feel like I am controlling the engagement with you, work better.
I'm naturally introverted, but I actively overcompensate for it. Over a decade ago, i tried to open my mind to chance conversations. I'd engage in any conversation with anyone -- cafes, grocery stores, etc. Unfortunately I ended up just getting invited to MLM meetings and occasional proselytization. Folks doing the proselytization were actually genuinely friendly, though I wasn't interested in converting. The MLM folks were the worst.
Eventually, I ended up back where I started -- only taking random conversations at work or technical events or set social events (e.g., sports)
That said, I think cold email is often abused (like any selling, promotion, or advertising can be) where many actors take it too far. This is another factor that I think gives cold email a bad perception by default. It’s just much easier to do things at scale and play the numbers game, so that’s what gets us here.
The first time I received one of these lead agency emails I was actually open to trying it and responded to it. After the thousandth time of receiving the same message, it goes to spam without a second thought.
I don't know you and never asked you for what you consider free work (which is basically some stupid script fetching data). Your trash isn't free work for me, just someone trying to make easy money.
As a side note, most agreeable people trying to sell shit is a terribly rude buyer. If you don't believe me, start replying to cold emails selling something back to them. Even better, use a different email and send a cold email too.
I am currently looking for a new job (potentially in a new industry), so I'm doing cold outreach to people whose experience seems relevant and/or interesting, asking for advice, and usually a phone call in which I can pick their brain
would you also view my emails as spam? if not, would you bother replying?
What I get are emails that say ‘I would love to write articles for your audience, please respond if you would like to see a sample.’ My site clearly doesn’t publish 3rd party articles. And if you were that keen, just send me the damned sample.
You’re okay.
In your specific example I wolud absolutely respond if someone needed a bit of help getting a job or whatever but I would be wary. I have had people pretend that is the case and then they are actually trying to sell me some offshore development team or whatever. So sadly I have to be a bit more guarded than I would normally like.
I enjoy submitting cold eMail to SpamCop.
But beyond that, no.
podcasts are a trojan horse to talk to decision makers
reach out linkedin saying
Hey name
love your content
I want to have you on podcast xyz
It gets emailed to list size 10,000
and we give you clips for social
you down?
20% response rate
friends
money
https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH
There are some parts that are useful without seeming too scummy - the bits on tone and how to actually write a good email, for instance. But the bulk of this is just an outright guide on how to spam.
The real problem is that Google Ads and Facebook Ads are 80% bots that just click and leave. If you track the behavior of ad clicks it looks super bot-like. Email and other mechanisms to read your human audience are massively necessary.
Our emails are first initial + last name @ business.com and I share the first initial and last name with someone in a different part of the company than me. Somehow I ended up with that email (no numbers) and I get emails constantly about stuff completely unrelated to what I work on. (He's a general manager at a large hotel property.)
I've even started getting invoices for the laundry at the hotel.
Eternal thread with me in CC so people can cover their asses? delete.
Large commite minutes? Delete
“Ok thanks” email? Delete
All external mail go to a folder where if the company is not working with us, I delete.
Easily 50% of my inbox (plus the 13-15% on top spam filters catch) never gets opened.
A lifesaver but sad to see all that storage and electricity gone to waste