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Deliverability
Links In Cold Email: What We Tested And What Gets Flagged
How many links can a cold email carry, and which ones get it flagged? We tested shorteners, redirects, IP links and blocklisted domains through a spam filter.
Ideas for better outbound.
Practical thinking on email outreach, deliverability, cold email practice and AI-assisted sequences.
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Short pieces on the parts of outbound that decide whether a campaign works.
Deliverability
SPF Softfail Or Hardfail? Choosing The Policy For Other Servers
Google recommends ~all and Microsoft recommends -all. What each tells a receiver, how DMARC treats them, and how to choose without losing forwarded mail.
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Cold Email
A Cold Email Spam Check Teardown, Before And After
We ran a badly built cold email through a spam check, fixed it in five rounds and logged the score each time. Removing spam words was the smallest fix.
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Deliverability
Multiple SPF Records: Why Two Break Mail And How To Merge Them
Two TXT records starting v=spf1 make SPF fail for all of your mail. How to merge them into one without dropping a sender or changing what the old ones meant.
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Deliverability
Inbox placement testing: how to find out where your emails really land
How an inbox placement test works: seed lists, Gmail tabs versus spam, reading Authentication-Results, checking blocklists and fixing problems in order.
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Cold Email
Spam trigger words in cold email: what actually matters in 2026
Spam trigger words rarely sink a cold email alone. Learn how filters weigh words against context, links and reputation, with word categories and rewrites.
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Deliverability
How to test your cold email template for spam before you send
What spam filters read in a cold email, how spam filter scoring works, the phrases worth rewriting and a pre-send checklist for testing a template for spam.
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Deliverability
Why your cold email lands in spam (and the DNS records that help)
Most cold email dies before anyone reads it — not because of the copy, but because the sending domain never proved it was allowed to send. Here is the mechanical checklist for that first gate.
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Warmup
Mailbox warmup: the ramp schedule that actually works
New mailboxes that jump straight to volume get filtered within days. Here is a concrete four-week ramp — with daily numbers — and the reasoning behind each stage.
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DNS
SPF, DKIM, DMARC explained for founders
Email authentication in plain language: what each record does, what the receiving server actually checks, and the copy-paste starting points for a new sending domain.
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Sequences
Sequence design: 4 steps, 3 days apart, one ask
More follow-ups don't mean more meetings. A four-step sequence with three-day gaps and a single consistent ask outperforms the eight-touch barrage — here is the template and the reasoning.
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Analytics
Deliverability metrics that matter (and the vanity ones that don't)
Open rate is lying to you, delivery rate measures almost nothing, and the numbers that predict whether your program survives are the ones nobody puts on a dashboard. A field guide.
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