I've had summer jobs that involve cold-contacting people in the same university that I worked in. The response rate to my initial email (sent from a university

I've had summer jobs that involve cold-contacting people in the same university that I worked in. The response rate to my initial email (sent from a university email address internally, directly related to the jobs of these people) was rarely above 10%. Calling them inevitably got "oh yeah, I saw that email". That was the point that our actual relationship started. I was never a huge fan of calling people, but I was forced to learn. It's definitely helped in subsequent business relationships. Email just isn't a way to communicate with the wider public. It's easy to forget that just because you spent 11 hours on something means that the person reading it will give it anything close to that. They're going to give you about 20 seconds. Long essays explaining everything never work. A short, to the point email with a couple of numbered questions works, and it means that inevitably when you call them the next day they can quickly get up to speed with what you're contacting them about. There's a tendency in tech-related areas to assume that everyone treats their email the same as you do, but in my experience the less techy a person is, the less they consider email to be important.