HN Explorer

Ask HN: How do you handle cold outreach emails?

1 points by hmokiguess ↗ HN
Hey HN, I try to practice inbox zero and I struggle with unread count even if it's on my junk folder.

I feel like now with AI the cold outreach has gotten orders of magnitude worse. I get countless of those that never stop from whatever automated lead funnel I happen to fall into from LinkedIn scrappers.

Is there a good solution to that?

3 comments

[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 16.0 ms ] thread
gus_massa
I use the "spam" button in gmail.
rekabis
Report to SpamCop. You need the entire eMail, including headers, but it’s worth it.

I was one of the submitters, back in the mid 2000s, that forced SpamCop to increase daily submission limits (in stages) from 200/day to over 20,000/day. After I breached 500/day I began using a personally-modified version of MailWasher (local-only/pre-cloud) to ram my noggin against their limit on the regular as I chased it upwards. This was also right about when MailWasher began offering batch submissions to SpamCop.

SpamCop eventually threw in the towel and unlocked my account entirely to let me run limit-free. Which was, apparently, a very rarefied club to be in. There was one week, during a particularly bad spam storm, where I was submitting more than 50k a day.

I don’t know exactly where I was in their leaderboard, but when they unlocked my account’s limit, the contact I was talking to let slip that I was among their top-10 most prolific submitters of all time.

I know I caused a lot of lingering trauma among spammers, as those same honeypots get only a handful of spam eMails a month these days. The decline started around 2012 and had slowed to a trickle by 2015. These days it’s pretty much a rounding error.