Cold Email Handbook | Hacker News Reader

Cold Email Handbook

za-zu.com

356 pointsbaxtr210 comments

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.

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.

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.)

You sound like a perfectly reasonable person, rather than a scammer.

> I’m not sitting around waiting to answer questions from strangers

So you’re not a subject matter expert for important business procedures or technologies?

Then the email address probably would have a familiar domain.

I am. OP is correct. To get his or my attention, you would need to put in more significantly more effort than you are asking back.

> significantly more effort than you are asking back.

This is backwards.

The transaction does not balance against an individual party. This is the double coincidence problem from economics.

You’re describing yourself as a net loss. I hope I’m not in your organization.

I somehow ended up on the spam list for the last election (funny, having never set my feet in the US) and it was painfully obvious that the goal of those headlines were to make people click them, thinking that it was a work e-mail.

This is for startups who are looking for that one in a hundred person hungry for their solution. Enterprises who have already scaled use an entirely different cook book to get the attention of a VP like yourself. A well-targeted and personalized email has a much better response rate for enterprises with a proven solution and well known brand.

The moment I started reading, "Set up multiple domains" I felt like I needed to shower. Sleazy indeed.

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?

> 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".

> 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.

> I'm not opposed to cold outreach, we've done that plenty, though without much success.

What kind of campaign messaging? How did you define success? Were you getting no replies at all?

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.

Precisely.

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.

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.

For me, they are both spam

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?

>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.

I think it's personality and experience.

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 don’t feel open to this theory of yours.

>> 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.

They are both spam and you are making the world worse. Congratulations on being part of the problem.

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.

You’re okay.

I get those exact same article spam emails. I always wonder what the angle is there, whether they are farming SEO juice or what the deal is.

I've always assumed that they charge you for publishing.

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 don't know anyone who likes receiving cold email.

I enjoy submitting cold eMail to SpamCop.

But beyond that, no.

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.

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.

> 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.

Won't be easy. https://foreignpolicy.com/2024/03/18/malaysia-china-real-est...

> 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.

Ah slack promised me to send me some swag if I responded to a survey done on the phone by a real person.

They never sent anything at all.

Proof of work as a way of making spam expensive was literally one of the suggested applications of hashcash, the first proof-of-work scheme (no ledger yet), at the time of its announcement in 1997[1].

[1] http://www.hashcash.org/papers/announce.txt

Next year: Hashcash consumes a fifth of the energy in the world. Wonder if malware in that timeline would steal computing from victims to spam other victims.

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...

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.

Can you define the line between spam and telemarketing?

To me those terms are synonymous and both mean unsolicited targeted advertising.

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.

> 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.

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.

Oh, I didn't realize that some people want some unsolicited advertisements. Am I an outlier for not wanting any?

What if you had a some kind of urgent need health/business/personal ? You tried finding the solution but cannot find anything. And somebody reached out to solve exactly that problem. Will you still not be interested ?

Statement: There's been so much abuse of email and phone marketing that I think many people will be hostile to your opinion.

Opinion: The email and phone marketing (cough) spam (cough) industry is full of people who delude themselves into believing what you think. Spam is defined by the recipient, not the sender, and there's no amount of mental gymnastics that you can follow to change the definition of what spam is.

>> it's any unwanted unsolicited contact

> unsolicited advertisements

Note the critical difference of "contact" versus "advertisement."

It's not just advertisements that are SPAM, it's newsletters, wrong email addresses, marketing. (For example, I've been subscribed to all kinds of weird stuff merely by attending political meetings. I once was sent a LinkedIn invitation to a party clown business because I attended my senator's information session on a bill he was promoting. Another time, I got a "guess" email from a high school kid trying to contact a school faculty member who had the same name as me. I've also had government demand letters for people with the same name as me, and COVID test results for people with the same name as me.)

Some people don't mind this kind of stuff. (Edit: If it's not 100% clear, I really, really mind this kind of stuff.)

> Am I an outlier for not wanting any?

I doubt it. Spend some time listening to other people, though. Some people are more tolerant of it than we are.

Personally, I think the way to reign it in is to ban all unsolicited contacts to email / phone and require that they go through a 3rd party mediator. (Kind of what happens with LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger) This way, if the 3rd party mediator sends you junk, you can cut them out.

Suppose someone called you and said "I would like to give you $10,000. Here are the private keys you can use to transfer to your wallet w/o me needing to collect any of your information."

I want no unsolicited advertisements but I want that one.

> 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.

I believe some already do. As a consequence, instead of doing redirects, the recommendation is now to use a landing page on the domains. I assume next the spam filters will start checking the quality of content of the domains, if they don't already. It's a never ending game of cat and mouse.

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.

You are going to go with IBM because nobody every gets fired for buying IBM.

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.

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)

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.

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

Spam from a company teaching you how to spam.

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...

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.

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.

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.

Big assumption to presume they do work.

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.

Right, but some of the rest of us have jobs that aren’t maximally parasitic.

the Nobel FAANG project manager vs the parasitic investment banker?

Well, we did build around 1000 solar plants globally with the invested money. I do wonder what you’re doing on HN if you don’t like investment banks though.

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.

Seems like a good way to get your whole domain blocked at my MX

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.

Why doesn't he just do:

  (Desired Daily Volume / 54.54)

Or even easier to remember:

  (Desired Daily Volume / 55)

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

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.

Alright, then. Let's assume that 1.1 is a safety factor. From whence 60?

3 sales representatives, each sending 20 cold emails per day. Yeah, it should be 3 * 20.

So if he adds more salesmen, he needs less domains? ))

They'll eventually run out of domains.

This supposed email marketing genius has as his technique "use a bunch of VPNs to buy separate gsuite and office365 accounts, and with these accounts, send from a bunch of similar sounding domains".

I've just brought his name and business name to the attention of some people at Microsoft and Google who can get it into the right hands. I do not think this genius plan is going to work out well for him.

That would be a juicy account, they are going to get their own VIP account executive and tickets to the superbowl.

I never unsubscribe (as I never subscribed in the first place) I just: right click > junk > block sender

If I keep getting stuff from them/they mildly changed email addresses - I just block the whole domain.

I suggested to our Cyber team that for the majority of people here we could just block all incoming emails from domains other than our own - and then operate a whitelist or holding pen for other incoming emails. In an average year, I can count on one hand the times I need to email externally, or am expecting to receive an external email - my roll (as many others) is inward facing.

Presumably easy enough to filter the corporate inbox to have Internal and External views - properly executed would probably make a top 10 productivity hacks list.

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?

My quess is that people need to justify their salary.

Sales is primarily commission. There is no time to waste.

Yeah and capitalism works and private companies are very efficient -_-'

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?

If they're doing that they're not targeting people who would actually buy what they sell.

Have you ever sold anything? It’s a very unique job because so much of it is rejection and there is almost a direct correlation between time and effort and outcome.

The book “the millionaire next door” (terrible title) analyzes generational wealth in the Us. And they identify sales as a useful experience for youth to gain confidence in their careers, for this reason.

The word you are looking for is lead generation. Knowing what customers are interested is a few stages of hard work down the pipeline.

I doubt "building character through rejections" makes any business sense.

Cold emails are based on the premise that you have a large targeted list of B2B emails. You've scraped for example a whole category of from Facebook or LinkedIn or whatever. Then you cold email them. You aim for a conversion between 1% and 3%, and if you send thousands of emails it soon becomes very lucrative.

My hunch is that people like you and the HN crowd are the outliers. The majority of people don't actually hate cold emails or what we perceive as "spam".

For example my wife and mother love advertisements for discount deals. They actively look for them, and object when I try to clean their computer/mailbox from that sort of stuff. The last time I said this on HN, I received sarcastic mocking replies, which just prove the point that it's the HN crowd that's "weird".

I actually think that you are correct.

I employ ad blockers, mass delete cold emails, and intentionally do not click "sponsored" links (even if they happen to be the one I really need). And yet, I had to "teach" my wife to avoid clicking ad links, and install ad blocker on her computer. And I assume most "regular" people are like this.

And "our" mentality, at least in my case, makes it hard to run a business as I see cold emails and ads as scam.

> and intentionally do not click "sponsored" links (even if they happen to be the one I really need).

But why? You don't feel compelled at all to contribute towards the financial health of the free product you're consuming? With just a tap of your finger?

I don't mind cold emails as long as they are relevant. Bonus points if I am going to learn something new beyond the pitch.

I think these things always come down to marketing preference, rather than “just built different”.

People here spend an exceptional amount of time reading PR for startups and technology products in the form of “tech news”.

I throw away all the spam in my (home) mailbox without opening it. Then one day I start worrying that my tree is a little unkempt and I get a letter about a tree trimming service. Suddenly I’m at least willing to give it a read.

Cold emails aren’t trying to persuade people who aren’t interested, they are trying to catch people at a time where they need that thing. Recruiters want to find people having a bad week at works

Also when you run a business you often care less about spending money and more about solving problems and saving time. So a sales contact offering a solution is saving you the hassle of finding a vendor.

If there were clearly better alternatives, then cold emailing wouldn't be a thing. Marketing is hard.

> 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.

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.

> people with budgets to spend

Flexing on linkedin is still king.

Ask HN: is cold messaging on LinkedIn comparable to or preferable to cold email?

> 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.

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.

I receive at least 10 a day.

> 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.

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.

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".

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.

Can we see a few samples?

The other day I got a question that sort of went:

  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.

> 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?

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Probably this?: 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

Received one of these today of all days:

https://imgur.com/a/hmBQgHH

I like how it even has a fake internal email thread at the bottom!

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.

How do you respond to those who call this spam?

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?

It's an interesting question! To me, an (or perhaps _the_) obvious threshold is once the emails become automated.

Why does that factor make it spam?

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).

> 2. It's trying to sell something / exploit people.

Are these synonymous?

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 think / is usually reserved for synonyms. Should just use the word "or" if it's this or that.

Yes / No

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).

> was okay if you weren't explicitly selling something.

The CAN-SPAM Act does not forbid explicitly selling something. Rather it requires an opt-out mechanism and identifiers for who the sender is.

Yeah okay - obviously varies by country although I think the opt-out mechanism is pretty universal.

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.

> Oh, it’s absolutely spam, by definition.

By whose definition? Source?

Here’s the FTC’s definition in a presentation to the House (https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_sta...):

> 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.

>sent, often in bulk, to a consumer

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.

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.

Here’s a 2024 link from the FTC: https://www.ftc.gov/business-guidance/resources/can-spam-act...

> 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.

Can confirm. Received the first email here from Justin and it worked on me.

See I like this, but because it’s personalized. A human did this intentionally, in a way that does not scale.

The author is advocating for nearly the opposite.

I love when a marketing campaign email template contains something like "btw, this is a real email, not a marketing campaign"

Much like when a chatbot says, Real person here!

Great, you are spamming HN telling a story about how you spam HN

> 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.

Welcome to HN, enjoy your stay, might want to take the email out of the prof.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...

1. Don't fucking do it

2. See #1

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

Id rather hear Cold War email stories

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!

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!

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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

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.

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.

Are there examples of prosecutions of this nature?

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 [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...

> [...] 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.

Thank you for clarifying! (I'm not a native speaker, so your answer is much appreciated).

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%.

> updating their spam filters and making it harder and harder to deliver sales emails at scale

Good

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

> sales emails at scale

That's a great definition for spam.

Great work there!! Bookmarked it!

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.

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.

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

You're not sure why people don't like unsolicited mail?

Please, feel free to post your email address then.

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com