Cold emailing without landing in spam

What it means

Cold emailing means writing to people who have never asked to hear from you: prospects, partners, journalists. Receivers cannot know you are a real business with a fair offer. They watch how you send, what you write and how recipients react. If the signals look like spam, your emails go to the spam folder, and your domain's reputation suffers for all your other emails too.

Why it matters

• Cold emails get more spam complaints than any other kind of email. Gmail and Yahoo ask senders to keep complaints under 0.3%, and ideally under 0.1%.
• Lists bought or scraped from the web contain many dead addresses and spam traps.
• A damaged reputation also hurts your invoices, support replies and password resets if they use the same domain.

How to check

Before a campaign, send one real prospecting email to your test address on the home page (/). The report shows if SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass, if your IP or domain is on a blacklist, and your SpamAssassin score. Also scan your sending domain at /domain-scanner.

How to fix it

1. Protect your main domain

Many teams send prospecting from a separate domain, such as yourdomain-mail.com or getyourdomain.com, with its own mailboxes. If it gets a bad reputation, your main domain is not affected. The new domain needs a real website or a redirect to yours, and its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC.

2. Set up authentication first

• SPF and DKIM must pass, and DKIM must be signed with your own domain.
• Publish a DMARC record, even with p=none at first.

3. Send slowly

1. A brand new mailbox should start with a handful of emails per day and grow over several weeks.
2. Even when warmed up, keep each mailbox to a modest daily volume, for example a few dozen emails.
3. Spread sending over the day rather than in one burst.

4. Clean your list

• Never buy lists. Find contacts one by one and make sure the email is relevant to their job.
• Verify addresses before sending. Keep the bounce rate under 2%; stop and clean if it climbs.

5. Write like a person

• Short plain text, personalised with something real about the recipient.
• One link at most, no attachments, no images, no open-tracking pixel in the first email.
• Avoid shouting subject lines, lots of capital letters and "free", "guaranteed", "act now".
• Send from a real person's name and a mailbox that can receive replies.

6. Make leaving easy

Add a simple line such as "Not interested? Reply 'no' and I will not write again", and respect it at once. Limit follow-ups to two or three. A person who can leave easily does not press the spam button. Also check the rules for unsolicited email in your recipients' country.

Check that it is fixed

Send a test from each prospecting mailbox to the home page address: authentication should pass and the score should be high. Then watch your reply, bounce and complaint numbers. Fewer replies and more bounces are early warnings: slow down before the spam folder becomes the norm.