20 ms·

Cold Email Handbook

356 points by baxtr 2y ago

CharlieDigital 2y ago
This is some real, deep-dive, high quality content here for anyone that wants to run an email campaign. Ran into some of the issues called out in this post; "rookie" mistakes when starting up email campaigns. Lives up to the playbook moniker.
ggm 2y ago
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.
- CharlieDigital 2y ago
  There's a lot of quality advice in here. 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.
  - ggm 2y ago
    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.
    - CharlieDigital 2y ago
      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.
- fargle 2y ago
  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/ 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."
anshulbhide 2y ago
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.
anshulbhide 2y ago
In the long run with AI - email outbound is dead as the marginal cost of creating personalised content decreases to the cost of LLM tokens. 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.
handfuloflight 2y ago
Would anyone like to share cold email war stories of success?
- parpfish 2y ago
  Id rather hear Cold War email stories
- einpoklum 2y ago
  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!
- kstrauser 2y ago
  Sure! I get a ridiculous number of cold emails to my personal address, and I've trained my spam filter to flag and delete nearly all of them. Success!
- cookiengineer 2y ago
  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: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Spam from a company teaching you how to spam.
- johnea 2y ago
  In decades to come this will join the likes of "would you like to buy the brooklyn bridge" in the ranks of classic ripoff strategies...
holden_nelson 2y ago
> The inbox, though, is still at least a little bit sacred. > 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.
- Avicebron 2y ago
  Welcome to HN, enjoy your stay, might want to take the email out of the prof.
- ipdashc 2y ago
  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.
pluc 2y ago
1. Don't fucking do it 2. See #1
pain_perdu 2y ago
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%.
- bhaney 2y ago
  > updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder to deliver sales emails at scale Good
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  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
- sksrbWgbfK 2y ago
  > sales emails at scale That's a great definition for spam.
a_t48 2y ago
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".
- bko 2y ago
  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
  - MrVandemar 2y ago
    > 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.
    - handfuloflight 2y ago
      > 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?
ttul 2y ago
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.
- dannyobrien 2y ago
  Are there examples of prosecutions of this nature?
  - ttul 2y ago
    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. Sources [1] CFAA Cases - NACDL https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases [2] Hacking the CFAA - Infosecurity Magazine https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/magazine-features/hacking-the-cfaa/ 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-most-controversial-computer-hacking-cases/ 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-policy-for-cfaa-prosecution-to-reflect-developments-in-web-scraping-and-other-matters/ 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-the-power-ventures-case-include-terms-of-use-can-create-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-liability 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-weighs-in-on-cfaa-and-can-spam/ https://ilccyberreport.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/9th-cir-weig...
chuckjchen 2y ago
Not sure why cold emails are hated by some people. But this is the most comprehensive and actionable cold outreach techniques I've seen.
- philipwhiuk 2y ago
  You're not sure why people don't like unsolicited mail?
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  Please, feel free to post your email address then.
- 8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
  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.
deleted 2y ago
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jmduke 2y ago
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 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.
icegreentea2 2y ago
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...
jampa 2y ago
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.
- ttul 2y ago
  I receive at least 10 a day.
- VTimofeenko 2y ago
  > passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. 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.
  - ChilledTonic 2y ago
    It’s extremely passive aggressive. I’ve gotten similar emails - if I’m not responding to you, take the hint - don’t try to neg me into responding.
    - VTimofeenko 2y ago
      Oh, I can absolutely understand how one would perceive this as a passive aggressive statement. 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".
- sakjur 2y ago
  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.
edelbitter 2y ago
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.
light_triad 2y ago
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
- handfuloflight 2y ago
  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.
jameslk 2y ago
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.
- meiraleal 2y ago
  For me, they are both spam
  - jameslk 2y ago
    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?
czhu12 2y ago
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.
- jameslk 2y ago
  Probably this?: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819807009635795405 https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819807009635795405 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
- welder 2y ago
  Received one of these today of all days: https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH
  - mv4 2y ago
    I like how it even has a fake internal email thread at the bottom!
ipdashc 2y ago
This is... certainly something. 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.
somid3 2y ago
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.
RandallBrown 2y ago
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.
deleted 2y ago
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freetanga 2y ago
I delete without reading half my inbox. 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
- deleted 2y ago
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shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago
Good irrelevant ads and well written spammy cold emails sent to the wrong leads yield no results, but this doesn't mean ads and cold emails are bad marketing ways. This handbook is all about using cold email marketing strategy right.
ChilledTonic 2y ago
There was a startup about a decade ago when crypto was just kind of becoming a mainstream-ish thing, where if someone emailed you, it would intercept it if it wasn’t on your contact list, and the app would automatically ask them for a bitcoin bribe to have you actually get the email to land in your inbox. I wonder weekly whatever happened to that company. I wish it took off. I get 100+ emails like this “handbook” a day and discard all of them. Want my attention? Spend your ad dollars on it, literally.
- avarun 2y ago
  You're referring to Balaji Srinivasan's startup, Earn, right? It was acquired by Coinbase and became Coinbase Earn, at which point Balaji became Coinbase's CTO, around 2018. I believe it's since been shut down.
  - csomar 2y ago
    > In September 2024, Srinivasan started The Network School, a school for people interested in developing "network nations" and "decentralized countries." Located in Forest City, Johor, Malaysia, the school had an initial enrollment of 150. Students are required to have an admiration of “Western values,” to believe Bitcoin is the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and to trust AI over human courts and judges.[21] From Wikipedia. Quite interesting. Will make sure to visit next time am in Malaysia.
    - alexp2021 2y ago
      Won't be easy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/malaysia-china-real-estate-countrygarden-forestcity/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/malaysia-china-real-est...
    - dbspin 2y ago
      > Students are required to have an admiration of “Western values,” to believe Bitcoin is the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and to trust AI over human courts and judges. Faith based education alive and well. That final requirement seems... Interesting to say the least.
taz123 2y ago
Great work there!! Bookmarked it!
icambron 2y ago
Putting aside all the sleazy parts for a moment, there is some good advice on actually writing a cold outreach email. But this part seems mistaken, or at least would be if I were your outreach target: > My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines. I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.
- dsr_ 2y ago
  Also, nobody uses my first name in their subject line except people trying to sell me something. And the only people using my first initial as my first name are people who scraped Linked-In.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - gus_massa 2y ago
    I use the name in the first line when there is some people in the cc (or bcc :) ) but it's a request for someone in particular: > Hi John! > Can you send me X for the Y project? In particular when the people in the cc (or bcc :) ) don't have the info about X but is interested in Y. (I use also "Hi everyone!" when I want to make it super clear that the email has been sent to a lot of persons.)
    - dsr_ 2y ago
      You sound like a perfectly reasonable person, rather than a scammer.
asdasdsddd 2y ago
I generally report emails as spam, and if I'm in a bad mood, I'll report it as terrorism
skc 2y ago
We all hate recieving cold emails, yet there is likely a majority of us in this post who work for companies that rely on cold emails to get sales that ultimately pay our salaries.
- cpursley 2y ago
  Yep, hn being engineer heavy, there’s a strong bias against marketing and sales. But that is what actually pays the bills, at least for us non-VC funded companies slugging it out in the real world.
  - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
    Piggybacking on your reply — I submit this is apples and oranges. An HN reader working for Microsoft isn’t working at a company that pays the bills on the back of cold sales emails. Microsoft is making its real deals in EBCs and at the metaphorical golf course. At a certain scale, customers tend to come to you rather than you having to go find prospects. The prospects you do have are ones you’re bidding on in some process, or you throw out a single cold email from some marketing automation tool. That isn’t an unqualified of course, and depends on your business. If all your customers are Fortune 500s, sales and marketing look a lot different.
- guappa 2y ago
  Big assumption to presume they do work.
  - devjab 2y ago
    When I worked in an investment bank 100% of the sales came from cold contacts originally. Some were calls others were emails. They work perfectly fine. Once someone was an investor they'd do repeat business, but they all started as cold contacts. I think one of the major issues with especially cold emails is that they extremely often reach the wrong people. Which is probably also why HN hates them so much. I've gotten so many of them when I was in no position to make any sort on decision on whatever they were trying to sell. Which is just a waste of everyones time. These days I just automatically delete external e-mails that aren't specifically whitelisted, but not everyone can do that for obvious reasons.
skwee357 2y ago
I don't understand how cold emails can work. I get a handful of cold emails with offers ranging from website/app developer (I'm a SWE myself, and never indicated that I need a website/app) all the way to "link exchange" (I have a SWE blog) with completely irrelevant content. I remember the most absurd one was when I got an email starting "I really liked your article about underwater welding" which was a response to my article about SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. I mean, even GPT wouldn't hallucinate that hard. So the majority of cold emails are pure garbage, and this logically leads to the realization that good cold emails are ones that are very personal and targeted. Writing personal and targeted emails take a lot of time, and my understanding that cold emails are a number's game, hence you can't really personalize (beyond addressing the recipient by their name, which even this many fail to do). So how cold emailing still a thing?
- guappa 2y ago
  My quess is that people need to justify their salary.
  - liontwist 2y ago
    Sales is primarily commission. There is no time to waste.
    - guappa 2y ago
      Yeah and capitalism works and private companies are very efficient -_-'
      - liontwist 2y ago
        What incentive structure have you found that makes your sales organization more efficient? What metrics indicate to you they are wasting time on cold emails that don’t product results?
        guappa 2y ago
netcan 2y ago
A lot of scandalized fainting and pearl clutching triggered by this. It's interesting what set of tactics do/don't trigger an instinctive "beyond the pale" reaction on HN. HNers seem to have a higher comparative tolerance for "marketing." Salesman stuff seem near the top of this list. For a lot of tactics, HN is more tolerant (less morally sensitive) than genpop. Eg optimizing user behaviour by embedding whole behavioural psychology lab in code. IMO, there is a "problem" in here somewhere. Competition for commercially relevant attention is extremely high these days. Sales, as a strategy, often lends really well to early user acquisition strategies. Often scales poorly, but that doesn't really matter.
- walrus01 2y ago
  Pearl clutcher here, reporting for duty. I consider this person's actions a direct threat to the health of the internet, and will expend a moderate amount of effort to ensure that his great startup plan falls flat on its face. For the same reason that I occasionally pick up trash in public and put it in a garbage can. It's not hard to do, and it makes the environment better for everyone else.
dizhn 2y ago
I don't know if it's from this handbook but I've been getting the same kind of cold emails from a bunch of different companies (mostly IT) who are very peculiar in that they all keep replying to themselves constantly and wanting to "connect" like they are peddling some top notch shit that I'd be crazy to miss. All of them also have a weird bottom section where you have to reply "No. Thx!" or something like that to stop receiving emails. I never tried to do that.
- walrus01 2y ago
  Seems like a good way to get your whole domain blocked at my MX
  - gwd 2y ago
    That's why TFA recommends buying multiple domains. He literally has a formula: (Desired Daily Volume / 60) x 1.1 He recommends that each domain have only 3 inboxes, and each inbox sends max 20 emails per day. So if you want to send 6000 emails per day, you should by 110 domains. So block away! Unless you're using regexes, it won't make a big dent.
    - dotancohen 2y ago
      Why doesn't he just do: (Desired Daily Volume / 54.54) Or even easier to remember: (Desired Daily Volume / 55)
      - dambi0 2y ago
        Probably the same reason we write things like SECONDS_IN_DAY = 60 * 60 * 24 The individual components have some meaning that loses clarity when we just write the result of the calculation
        blitzar 2y ago
        I do that because I can't remember that there are 86400 seconds in day so work it out from first principles each time. I also sing the alphabet song (in my head) when I want to know which is the 19th letter of the alphabet.
walrus01 2y ago
From the page: > Buying and setting up adjacent domains. > Optimizing your domains for deliverability There's a term for this, it's called spam, and the specific method is snowshoeing
openrisk 2y ago
Its a law in human network communications theory [1] that any channel will degrade to the point of being usable if there are no penalties to pay when abusing it. There are downsides to indiscriminately mailing, posting etc. peoples inboxes (e.g. reputational damage), but this applies to entities that already have a reputation to worry about. For entities operating in "do or die mode" or are very short-termist / opportunistic even very low success rates may be rational. [1] just made this up
rapht 2y ago
CFO's perspective: wanna sell me something, anything? you're out. However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender. Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.
- blitzar 2y ago
  You are going to go with IBM because nobody every gets fired for buying IBM.
  - rapht 2y ago
    I don't know what makes you say that. Requiring a bit of market research from project proponents does not mean excluding anything lightweight or just new. What you don't want is some company being contracted because it talked to you first by whatever channel rather than as a result of some reasoned assessment.
    - blitzar 2y ago
      How do you research something you don't know exists? > wanna sell me something, anything? you're out. Advertise? you're out. Have a website? you're out. Go on the Shark Tank? you're out. Do a "Show HN"? you're out. Reply to an open call to tender? you're out. > I don't know what makes you say that "CFO". IBM is the classic choice of the CFO class - they dont want to get fired so they a) dont make a decision or b) chose IBM because they were not "selling them something" (except for all the sales and marketting they do)
      - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
        Is your argument that you could only find out about a product or service if it’s advertised to you? If so, that has not been my experience. In my business I typically select against products or services that cold email/call me. But that’s never been a problem. When I need to find a third party solution I start educating myself on the topic and search for vendors. It’s not that difficult.
billpg 2y ago
I feel the main problem with email is that it isn't default-deny. When I set up a mailbox, no-one should be able to send me messages until I pre-approve the sender.
arkh 2y ago
> Email is where important conversations happen. More like Email is this thing you forgot to check for a month because every time you go there it is mostly spam.
- unsupp0rted 2y ago
  That might be true of devs who spend all day inside Slack and Jira at work and Discord/messengers at home. It's definitely not true of people with budgets to spend. Email is still king.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    > people with budgets to spend Flexing on linkedin is still king.
    - unsupp0rted 2y ago
      Ask HN: is cold messaging on LinkedIn comparable to or preferable to cold email?
- gdjskshh 2y ago
  > Email is this thing you forgot to check for a month because every time you go there it is mostly spam. As a society, should we allow private entities to destroy valuable institutions? We used to have a technology (email) that increased productivity and added value to individual lives. That value has been eliminated by spammers trying to cold-extract money from everyone with an email account. Spammers killing email is an externality we shouldn't accept, similar to not accept Monsanto killing bald eagles by selling DDT. Don't get too comfy in your chats, spammers are coming for your discords and slacks next, and that wave will be lead by LLMs.
anonu 2y ago
nice post - especially as it focuses on lots of the technical aspects. however > on track to generate $500M in pipeline for our clients in 2024, and we hit $1M in ARR sounds like a lot of spam - which carries with it varying degrees of illegality depending on the region. What's better than a cold outbound? A warm outbound...
gwbas1c 2y ago
I get with cold email / cold calling, the line between SPAM / telemarketing can get kind of blurry. In this case, the multi-domain & multi email address technique puts this clearly on the SPAM side of the line. But it's good to know: Hopefully SPAM filters start looking for 3xx redirects and blocking all email that comes from a domain with a 3xx redirect.
- gdjskshh 2y ago
  Can you define the line between spam and telemarketing? To me those terms are synonymous and both mean unsolicited targeted advertising.
  - MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
    I think of it as, “if everyone did this would it still work”. If you are blasting out emails knowing most will be ignored, in the hopes that one lands in the right inbox, that’s bad. If everyone did the same, no one would ever find the useful opportunities among the sea of irrelevant trash. If you are sending cold emails to people you know will be interested, that’s fine. There is no upper bound on how many actually useful opportunities people are willing to receive.
    - ASalazarMX 2y ago
      > If you are sending cold emails to people you know will be interested, that’s fine. This is my rule. If I gave you my info at some time, and you have a new product you think could be relevant for me, fine. If you got a contact list from some convention, and are shotgunning it with "We sell X. If you're not in charge of Y, please direct me to the appropriate person", I'll report it as spam faster than The Flash.
  - gwbas1c 2y ago
    Line between cold calling vs telemarking, or cold email vs SPAM. As far as what the line is, it's any unwanted unsolicited contact, as defined by the recipient, not by the party initiating the call or sending the email. IE, there's no universal set of checkboxes that a marketer can follow that magically make unwanted unsolicited email / phone calls not SPAM.
deleted 2y ago
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keybored 2y ago
The nice thing about being a nobody: all unsolicited emails are spam by definition.
Brajeshwar 2y ago
FYI, AdGuard Blacklists the website https://reports.adguard.com/en/www.za-zu.com/report.html https://reports.adguard.com/en/www.za-zu.com/report.html
burnte 2y ago
It always astounds me that salespeople still rely on cold contacts. I have literally never once done business with a cold-contact emailer. To me it screams desperation, they have so few good ideas and leads that they're left with cold-contacts. I don't even know anyone who has bought from cold contacts.
lazzlazzlazz 2y ago
> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines. This strategy has been in use for years and I perceive such subject lines as an indicator that an email is probably an outright scam. All senders receive a silent and permanent block from me without exception. Maybe the author isn't aware of how much alienation he's creating for his brand.
xyst 2y ago
fyi: adguard has this site on a blocklist, probably a false positive?
skyzyx 2y ago
Unless I personally gave you my work email address, you can f*k right the hell off. Buying a list of email addresses off the internet that has mine in it is top-tier shady.

356 points by baxtr 2y ago

This is some real, deep-dive, high quality content here for anyone that wants to run an email campaign. Ran into some of the issues called out in this post; "rookie" mistakes when starting up email campaigns. Lives up to the playbook moniker.

ggm 2y ago

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.

CharlieDigital 2y ago
There's a lot of quality advice in here. 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.
- ggm 2y ago
  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.
  - CharlieDigital 2y ago
    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.
fargle 2y ago
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/ 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."

anshulbhide 2y ago

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.

anshulbhide 2y ago

In the long run with AI - email outbound is dead as the marginal cost of creating personalised content decreases to the cost of LLM tokens. 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.

handfuloflight 2y ago

Would anyone like to share cold email war stories of success?

parpfish 2y ago
Id rather hear Cold War email stories
einpoklum 2y ago
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!
kstrauser 2y ago
Sure! I get a ridiculous number of cold emails to my personal address, and I've trained my spam filter to flag and delete nearly all of them. Success!
cookiengineer 2y ago
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: https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam https://github.com/cookiengineer/antispam

hn_throwaway_99 2y ago

Spam from a company teaching you how to spam.

johnea 2y ago
In decades to come this will join the likes of "would you like to buy the brooklyn bridge" in the ranks of classic ripoff strategies...

holden_nelson 2y ago

> The inbox, though, is still at least a little bit sacred. > 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.

Avicebron 2y ago
Welcome to HN, enjoy your stay, might want to take the email out of the prof.
ipdashc 2y ago
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.

pluc 2y ago

1. Don't fucking do it 2. See #1

pain_perdu 2y ago

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%.

bhaney 2y ago
> updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder to deliver sales emails at scale Good
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
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
sksrbWgbfK 2y ago
> sales emails at scale That's a great definition for spam.

a_t48 2y ago

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".

bko 2y ago
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
- MrVandemar 2y ago
  > 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.
  - handfuloflight 2y ago
    > 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?

ttul 2y ago

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.

dannyobrien 2y ago
Are there examples of prosecutions of this nature?
- ttul 2y ago
  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. Sources [1] CFAA Cases - NACDL https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases https://www.nacdl.org/Content/CFAACases [2] Hacking the CFAA - Infosecurity Magazine https://www.infosecurity-magazine.com/magazine-features/hacking-the-cfaa/ 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-most-controversial-computer-hacking-cases/ 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-policy-for-cfaa-prosecution-to-reflect-developments-in-web-scraping-and-other-matters/ 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-the-power-ventures-case-include-terms-of-use-can-create-computer-fraud-and-abuse-act-liability 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-weighs-in-on-cfaa-and-can-spam/ https://ilccyberreport.wordpress.com/2016/07/21/9th-cir-weig...

chuckjchen 2y ago

Not sure why cold emails are hated by some people. But this is the most comprehensive and actionable cold outreach techniques I've seen.

philipwhiuk 2y ago
You're not sure why people don't like unsolicited mail?
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
Please, feel free to post your email address then.
8n4vidtmkvmk 2y ago
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.

deleted 2y ago

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jmduke 2y ago

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 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.

icegreentea2 2y ago

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...

jampa 2y ago

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.

ttul 2y ago
I receive at least 10 a day.
VTimofeenko 2y ago
> passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. 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.
- ChilledTonic 2y ago
  It’s extremely passive aggressive. I’ve gotten similar emails - if I’m not responding to you, take the hint - don’t try to neg me into responding.
  - VTimofeenko 2y ago
    Oh, I can absolutely understand how one would perceive this as a passive aggressive statement. 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".
sakjur 2y ago
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.

edelbitter 2y ago

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.

light_triad 2y ago

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

handfuloflight 2y ago
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.

jameslk 2y ago

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.

meiraleal 2y ago
For me, they are both spam
- jameslk 2y ago
  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?

czhu12 2y ago

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.

jameslk 2y ago
Probably this?: https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819807009635795405 https://x.com/codyschneiderxx/status/1819807009635795405 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
welder 2y ago
Received one of these today of all days: https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH
- mv4 2y ago
  I like how it even has a fake internal email thread at the bottom!

ipdashc 2y ago

This is... certainly something. 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.

somid3 2y ago

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.

RandallBrown 2y ago

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.

deleted 2y ago

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freetanga 2y ago

I delete without reading half my inbox. 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

deleted 2y ago
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shahzaibmushtaq 2y ago

Good irrelevant ads and well written spammy cold emails sent to the wrong leads yield no results, but this doesn't mean ads and cold emails are bad marketing ways. This handbook is all about using cold email marketing strategy right.

ChilledTonic 2y ago

There was a startup about a decade ago when crypto was just kind of becoming a mainstream-ish thing, where if someone emailed you, it would intercept it if it wasn’t on your contact list, and the app would automatically ask them for a bitcoin bribe to have you actually get the email to land in your inbox. I wonder weekly whatever happened to that company. I wish it took off. I get 100+ emails like this “handbook” a day and discard all of them. Want my attention? Spend your ad dollars on it, literally.

avarun 2y ago
You're referring to Balaji Srinivasan's startup, Earn, right? It was acquired by Coinbase and became Coinbase Earn, at which point Balaji became Coinbase's CTO, around 2018. I believe it's since been shut down.
- csomar 2y ago
  > In September 2024, Srinivasan started The Network School, a school for people interested in developing "network nations" and "decentralized countries." Located in Forest City, Johor, Malaysia, the school had an initial enrollment of 150. Students are required to have an admiration of “Western values,” to believe Bitcoin is the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and to trust AI over human courts and judges.[21] From Wikipedia. Quite interesting. Will make sure to visit next time am in Malaysia.
  - alexp2021 2y ago
    Won't be easy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/malaysia-china-real-estate-countrygarden-forestcity/ https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/malaysia-china-real-est...
  - dbspin 2y ago
    > Students are required to have an admiration of “Western values,” to believe Bitcoin is the successor to the US Federal Reserve, and to trust AI over human courts and judges. Faith based education alive and well. That final requirement seems... Interesting to say the least.

taz123 2y ago

Great work there!! Bookmarked it!

icambron 2y ago

Putting aside all the sleazy parts for a moment, there is some good advice on actually writing a cold outreach email. But this part seems mistaken, or at least would be if I were your outreach target: > My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines. I immediately delete any email with a subject line like “quick question”. It does not give me any reason to think I will get any value from it, and what are the chances I will care about answering whatever the question turns out to be? I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers, so an email subject line has to tell me what I’m being offered for me to invest that time. In fact “quick question” is already asking me for something (“answer my question”) which just seems unreasonable from an unsolicited email.

dsr_ 2y ago
Also, nobody uses my first name in their subject line except people trying to sell me something. And the only people using my first initial as my first name are people who scraped Linked-In.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- gus_massa 2y ago
  I use the name in the first line when there is some people in the cc (or bcc :) ) but it's a request for someone in particular: > Hi John! > Can you send me X for the Y project? In particular when the people in the cc (or bcc :) ) don't have the info about X but is interested in Y. (I use also "Hi everyone!" when I want to make it super clear that the email has been sent to a lot of persons.)
  - dsr_ 2y ago
    You sound like a perfectly reasonable person, rather than a scammer.

asdasdsddd 2y ago

I generally report emails as spam, and if I'm in a bad mood, I'll report it as terrorism

skc 2y ago

We all hate recieving cold emails, yet there is likely a majority of us in this post who work for companies that rely on cold emails to get sales that ultimately pay our salaries.

cpursley 2y ago
Yep, hn being engineer heavy, there’s a strong bias against marketing and sales. But that is what actually pays the bills, at least for us non-VC funded companies slugging it out in the real world.
- TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
  Piggybacking on your reply — I submit this is apples and oranges. An HN reader working for Microsoft isn’t working at a company that pays the bills on the back of cold sales emails. Microsoft is making its real deals in EBCs and at the metaphorical golf course. At a certain scale, customers tend to come to you rather than you having to go find prospects. The prospects you do have are ones you’re bidding on in some process, or you throw out a single cold email from some marketing automation tool. That isn’t an unqualified of course, and depends on your business. If all your customers are Fortune 500s, sales and marketing look a lot different.
guappa 2y ago
Big assumption to presume they do work.
- devjab 2y ago
  When I worked in an investment bank 100% of the sales came from cold contacts originally. Some were calls others were emails. They work perfectly fine. Once someone was an investor they'd do repeat business, but they all started as cold contacts. I think one of the major issues with especially cold emails is that they extremely often reach the wrong people. Which is probably also why HN hates them so much. I've gotten so many of them when I was in no position to make any sort on decision on whatever they were trying to sell. Which is just a waste of everyones time. These days I just automatically delete external e-mails that aren't specifically whitelisted, but not everyone can do that for obvious reasons.

skwee357 2y ago

I don't understand how cold emails can work. I get a handful of cold emails with offers ranging from website/app developer (I'm a SWE myself, and never indicated that I need a website/app) all the way to "link exchange" (I have a SWE blog) with completely irrelevant content. I remember the most absurd one was when I got an email starting "I really liked your article about underwater welding" which was a response to my article about SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT. I mean, even GPT wouldn't hallucinate that hard. So the majority of cold emails are pure garbage, and this logically leads to the realization that good cold emails are ones that are very personal and targeted. Writing personal and targeted emails take a lot of time, and my understanding that cold emails are a number's game, hence you can't really personalize (beyond addressing the recipient by their name, which even this many fail to do). So how cold emailing still a thing?

guappa 2y ago
My quess is that people need to justify their salary.
- liontwist 2y ago
  Sales is primarily commission. There is no time to waste.
  - guappa 2y ago
    Yeah and capitalism works and private companies are very efficient -_-'
    - liontwist 2y ago
      What incentive structure have you found that makes your sales organization more efficient? What metrics indicate to you they are wasting time on cold emails that don’t product results?
      - guappa 2y ago

netcan 2y ago

A lot of scandalized fainting and pearl clutching triggered by this. It's interesting what set of tactics do/don't trigger an instinctive "beyond the pale" reaction on HN. HNers seem to have a higher comparative tolerance for "marketing." Salesman stuff seem near the top of this list. For a lot of tactics, HN is more tolerant (less morally sensitive) than genpop. Eg optimizing user behaviour by embedding whole behavioural psychology lab in code. IMO, there is a "problem" in here somewhere. Competition for commercially relevant attention is extremely high these days. Sales, as a strategy, often lends really well to early user acquisition strategies. Often scales poorly, but that doesn't really matter.

walrus01 2y ago
Pearl clutcher here, reporting for duty. I consider this person's actions a direct threat to the health of the internet, and will expend a moderate amount of effort to ensure that his great startup plan falls flat on its face. For the same reason that I occasionally pick up trash in public and put it in a garbage can. It's not hard to do, and it makes the environment better for everyone else.

dizhn 2y ago

I don't know if it's from this handbook but I've been getting the same kind of cold emails from a bunch of different companies (mostly IT) who are very peculiar in that they all keep replying to themselves constantly and wanting to "connect" like they are peddling some top notch shit that I'd be crazy to miss. All of them also have a weird bottom section where you have to reply "No. Thx!" or something like that to stop receiving emails. I never tried to do that.

walrus01 2y ago
Seems like a good way to get your whole domain blocked at my MX
- gwd 2y ago
  That's why TFA recommends buying multiple domains. He literally has a formula: (Desired Daily Volume / 60) x 1.1 He recommends that each domain have only 3 inboxes, and each inbox sends max 20 emails per day. So if you want to send 6000 emails per day, you should by 110 domains. So block away! Unless you're using regexes, it won't make a big dent.
  - dotancohen 2y ago
    Why doesn't he just do: (Desired Daily Volume / 54.54) Or even easier to remember: (Desired Daily Volume / 55)
    - dambi0 2y ago
      Probably the same reason we write things like SECONDS_IN_DAY = 60 * 60 * 24 The individual components have some meaning that loses clarity when we just write the result of the calculation
      - blitzar 2y ago
        I do that because I can't remember that there are 86400 seconds in day so work it out from first principles each time. I also sing the alphabet song (in my head) when I want to know which is the 19th letter of the alphabet.

walrus01 2y ago

From the page: > Buying and setting up adjacent domains. > Optimizing your domains for deliverability There's a term for this, it's called spam, and the specific method is snowshoeing

openrisk 2y ago

Its a law in human network communications theory [1] that any channel will degrade to the point of being usable if there are no penalties to pay when abusing it. There are downsides to indiscriminately mailing, posting etc. peoples inboxes (e.g. reputational damage), but this applies to entities that already have a reputation to worry about. For entities operating in "do or die mode" or are very short-termist / opportunistic even very low success rates may be rational. [1] just made this up

rapht 2y ago

CFO's perspective: wanna sell me something, anything? you're out. However well crafted your email is, you're an unacceptable distraction from the priorities that the company has set, the achievement of which is materialized by projects of varying size and scope. Upon starting any project of any size, people do due diligence: they assess what exactly it is they are looking for, and then research the market for it. For macro-projects, consultants may be hired to help with the process, which may lead to a proper tender. Either way, the company contacts you, not the other way round.

blitzar 2y ago
You are going to go with IBM because nobody every gets fired for buying IBM.
- rapht 2y ago
  I don't know what makes you say that. Requiring a bit of market research from project proponents does not mean excluding anything lightweight or just new. What you don't want is some company being contracted because it talked to you first by whatever channel rather than as a result of some reasoned assessment.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    How do you research something you don't know exists? > wanna sell me something, anything? you're out. Advertise? you're out. Have a website? you're out. Go on the Shark Tank? you're out. Do a "Show HN"? you're out. Reply to an open call to tender? you're out. > I don't know what makes you say that "CFO". IBM is the classic choice of the CFO class - they dont want to get fired so they a) dont make a decision or b) chose IBM because they were not "selling them something" (except for all the sales and marketting they do)
    - TheNewsIsHere 2y ago
      Is your argument that you could only find out about a product or service if it’s advertised to you? If so, that has not been my experience. In my business I typically select against products or services that cold email/call me. But that’s never been a problem. When I need to find a third party solution I start educating myself on the topic and search for vendors. It’s not that difficult.

billpg 2y ago

I feel the main problem with email is that it isn't default-deny. When I set up a mailbox, no-one should be able to send me messages until I pre-approve the sender.

arkh 2y ago

> Email is where important conversations happen. More like Email is this thing you forgot to check for a month because every time you go there it is mostly spam.

unsupp0rted 2y ago
That might be true of devs who spend all day inside Slack and Jira at work and Discord/messengers at home. It's definitely not true of people with budgets to spend. Email is still king.
- blitzar 2y ago
  > people with budgets to spend Flexing on linkedin is still king.
  - unsupp0rted 2y ago
    Ask HN: is cold messaging on LinkedIn comparable to or preferable to cold email?
gdjskshh 2y ago
> Email is this thing you forgot to check for a month because every time you go there it is mostly spam. As a society, should we allow private entities to destroy valuable institutions? We used to have a technology (email) that increased productivity and added value to individual lives. That value has been eliminated by spammers trying to cold-extract money from everyone with an email account. Spammers killing email is an externality we shouldn't accept, similar to not accept Monsanto killing bald eagles by selling DDT. Don't get too comfy in your chats, spammers are coming for your discords and slacks next, and that wave will be lead by LLMs.

anonu 2y ago

nice post - especially as it focuses on lots of the technical aspects. however > on track to generate $500M in pipeline for our clients in 2024, and we hit $1M in ARR sounds like a lot of spam - which carries with it varying degrees of illegality depending on the region. What's better than a cold outbound? A warm outbound...

gwbas1c 2y ago

I get with cold email / cold calling, the line between SPAM / telemarketing can get kind of blurry. In this case, the multi-domain & multi email address technique puts this clearly on the SPAM side of the line. But it's good to know: Hopefully SPAM filters start looking for 3xx redirects and blocking all email that comes from a domain with a 3xx redirect.

gdjskshh 2y ago
Can you define the line between spam and telemarketing? To me those terms are synonymous and both mean unsolicited targeted advertising.
- MeetingsBrowser 2y ago
  I think of it as, “if everyone did this would it still work”. If you are blasting out emails knowing most will be ignored, in the hopes that one lands in the right inbox, that’s bad. If everyone did the same, no one would ever find the useful opportunities among the sea of irrelevant trash. If you are sending cold emails to people you know will be interested, that’s fine. There is no upper bound on how many actually useful opportunities people are willing to receive.
  - ASalazarMX 2y ago
    > If you are sending cold emails to people you know will be interested, that’s fine. This is my rule. If I gave you my info at some time, and you have a new product you think could be relevant for me, fine. If you got a contact list from some convention, and are shotgunning it with "We sell X. If you're not in charge of Y, please direct me to the appropriate person", I'll report it as spam faster than The Flash.
- gwbas1c 2y ago
  Line between cold calling vs telemarking, or cold email vs SPAM. As far as what the line is, it's any unwanted unsolicited contact, as defined by the recipient, not by the party initiating the call or sending the email. IE, there's no universal set of checkboxes that a marketer can follow that magically make unwanted unsolicited email / phone calls not SPAM.

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keybored 2y ago

The nice thing about being a nobody: all unsolicited emails are spam by definition.

Brajeshwar 2y ago

FYI, AdGuard Blacklists the website https://reports.adguard.com/en/www.za-zu.com/report.html https://reports.adguard.com/en/www.za-zu.com/report.html

burnte 2y ago

It always astounds me that salespeople still rely on cold contacts. I have literally never once done business with a cold-contact emailer. To me it screams desperation, they have so few good ideas and leads that they're left with cold-contacts. I don't even know anyone who has bought from cold contacts.

lazzlazzlazz 2y ago

> My best rule for writing good subject lines is that they feel like they could be the subject lines of an internal email—this helps them feel natural in the inbox. For example, “Quick question”, or “Idea for better outbound” are two casual, natural-feeling subject lines. This strategy has been in use for years and I perceive such subject lines as an indicator that an email is probably an outright scam. All senders receive a silent and permanent block from me without exception. Maybe the author isn't aware of how much alienation he's creating for his brand.

xyst 2y ago

fyi: adguard has this site on a blocklist, probably a false positive?

skyzyx 2y ago

Unless I personally gave you my work email address, you can f*k right the hell off. Buying a list of email addresses off the internet that has mine in it is top-tier shady.