Transcription
Cold email just changed again in a big way, and I wanted to make this video and get it out to you as soon as possible. So, forgive me. There's going to be no fancy editing or motion graphics here.
This past 30 days has been some of the most challenging that I've ever faced as a business owner with thousands of cold email clients that rely on me to stay up to date and know what's going on in the world of deliverability and cold email and Google and Microsoft. Well, a lot of us just got blindsided, uh, several weeks ago, and Google shut down thousands of Google mailboxes, and people freaked out, said cold email was over. And if you watched any of those videos, I explained exactly what happened there.
But when stuff like this happens, and it happens at least once a year, so there's some kind of scare, something changes, and everybody freaks out. And then us cold emailers, marketers have to adapt. They figure it out. They make some changes. And you forget that the thing that was the apocalypse, it was totally in the past and not even relevant anymore.
But when stuff like this happens, it forces you to look at all of your systems and say, you know what, it's time maybe to rebuild, to redesign, to protect ourselves going forward. And that's exactly what I did over the past month. We redesigned all of our systems. All right, enough fluff. Let's get into it. What has changed? What do you need to know?
Well, let's start with the big technical changes because a lot of the recommendations, if you watched like my four-hour master class, even my seven-hour master class that I did several months ago, are completely different. So, I'm going to go ahead and push a button. I'm going to share my screen and just show you a couple of things because the reality is, cold email leaves a lot of fingerprints, and email service providers, ESPs like Google and Microsoft can easily look at these fingerprints and say, "That guy is doing cold email," and "That one, I'm not so sure."
So, a big initiative for me in 2026 is identifying those fingerprints and burning them off. You don't want to leave any trace. So, let's go into cold email mailboxes inside of Instantly AI. And, you know, it it's weird. Google shut down a bunch of legacy panels. This is what we were using to set up a lot of Google mailboxes. There's two main strategies that us cold email info providers use: legacy panels and reseller accounts. A lot of the legacy panels got disabled. We probably lost 20% of our hundreds of Google legacy panels, and a lot of them remain unaffected, like the ones that you see here.
So, a big initiative that I put together with a lot of our our top cold email founders is, why, why are some of these panels getting affected and some of these not getting affected? And although we don't have any answers for certain yet, a lot of it we believe comes down to these fingerprints. So, you're probably going to see this this mistake and the thing that we changed going forward because this mailbox was launched in 2024. And as you can see, deliverability is excellent. But if I come into settings here, what we used to do for all of our cold email mailboxes was set up these custom tracking domains.
Now, when I say fingerprints, I'm talking about what can Google and Microsoft easily see about a mailbox and be certain that that mailbox is being used for cold email because they're not just going to go willy-nilly shutting down a bunch of uh domains and mailboxes because they suspect them of doing cold email. That's why having the same picture or different name variations is not a good way for them to tell that a mailbox is doing cold email. But what is a good way is a bunch of CNAME records, all pointing to the same value here, prox.itrackly.com. It's really easy for Google to say, "Okay, if they have a CNAME record pointing there, it's probably a custom tracking domain for Instantly, they're doing cold email."
So, what we're recommending now is no custom tracking domains. We're going to be removing them from all our existing mailboxes and not setting them up with new mailboxes. So, what is what does this do? What's the effect of this? You know, if this was a year ago, I would have told you, "This is, of course, you're not going to do this. Of course, you're not going to remove your custom tracking domains." So, the purpose is the ESP doesn't see that it's using Instantly's native custom tracking domain. It's using my custom tracking domain, this one, instead of the one Instantly is going to put in there by default. However, they can look at the DNS records on a domain and see this.
Now, if we're not doing open tracking, or we're not including unsubscribe links, we're not doing link tracking, which is now the recommended practice, we're not doing any of that, there's really no purpose left for this custom tracking domain. It's not being used. So, why have that DNS record in your domain? We're scrapping it. No more custom tracking domains. That's the first big change that I'm going to give you for recommended gold standards for setting up your cold email setup.
Now, what about the second thing? The second technical thing that's going to be slightly different here, and this one's going to be harder to combat. And if I go to add a new Google mailbox in my Instantly account, I'm going to go ahead and add Google. The main way that you're going to be syncing your Google accounts is through this OAuth. Now, when you're setting this up for the first time, they walk you through it, and you basically put an OAuth code inside of your Google, your Google admin. This is another fingerprint that they can use to say, "Everyone's got the same OAuth pointing to the same the same domain. This is probably being used for cold email."
So, there's two things that we can do to get around this. And by the way, none of this is going to be make or break. I know a lot of people are going to hear what I have to say and and think they have to change everything right away. They don't. I'm I'm being overly cautious, and we're preparing for the future. This is what we're doing. So, if you want to avoid using OAuth, or even app passwords, because it kind of exposes the same vulnerability, then there's two things you can do. You can either not use Google accounts, which is one of the things that we're starting to go away from. We're starting to go away from Google and going more into really high-quality SMTP providers.
But the other thing that you can do, and I and I see a lot of the top cold emailers, especially cold email agencies, is going over to what we call like a walled garden, where the instead of going to Instantly AI and everything pointing to Instantly AI, using something like Email Bison, which is on my own server. So, anytime that I do uh any custom domains, custom tracking, OAuth, app passwords, it's all pointing to my custom server. Again, this is just reducing fingerprints.
Now, if you are interested in Email Bison, I'm just going to show you this quickly uh and show you why a lot of the top cold email agencies are starting to go over here. Instantly is still an amazing product and still beats Email Bison in several different places, and I'll show you why. But if you are interested in doing something like this for your cold email agency, uh use use the link down below. But you do have to get approved. Then you do need to only use really good mailboxes. Now, the reason I can't just say go sign up is because you can't. You have to go through a sales process. You have to get approved, and then even if you do, it's $500 a month starting. However, where Email Bison is great, they're also lacking a lot of the features inside of Instantly that's going to, I think, make the biggest difference for you right away.
One of the worst things that you can do to get your mailboxes suspended or deleted is get flagged by Google. So, how do you stay under the radar from Google and from Microsoft? The main things are email sending volume. You want to keep your volume as low as possible. And I think that's one of the main reasons that my mailboxes are still safe. All of the mailboxes that I'm using for my companies have not been affected. They're all in the same legacy panels, but because I keep the email volume down under 20 emails per day per account, none of those emails or domains have been flagged. And I think that's one of the biggest factors.
But the second factor is how often you're getting reported as spam. It's one of the easiest things in the world for Google to see those spam complaints and point it to cold email. So, one of the features that Instantly AI has, I'm just going to go back to my screen here, to help prevent people from reporting you as spam because they collect so much data about cold email and how people respond to that cold email. They actually have enabled some really powerful features that I need you to turn on today. And this is going to make a huge difference for you guys in staying safe and protected uh as as the years go on with cold email, utilizing all of their data for your own benefit.
So, what you're going to do is come into the bottom left-hand corner. You're going to come into settings, and then we're going to come into advanced deliverability. I think you might need to be on a Pro plan to activate this. Uh, if you're not, you should be anyways. And the other thing that you should do is activate inbox placement recurring testing. I did a whole video on that. If you if you don't already have that set up, go watch that video now because you want to turn that feature on. It's going to help really keep you on top of deliverability.
So, what they what they did here is they're utilizing all of their data to know who's unlikely to reply to your cold emails and who's hostile, who's angry. Those hostile people are most likely going to be the ones reporting you as spam and filing those complaints. That raises those alarm bells for Google and gets them to shut down your accounts. And not just Google, that's going to be Microsoft as well. So, make sure to your skip hostile prospects, and if you do have unlikely to reply, either send last or you can skip those as well. The other thing that's going to do is it's going to increase the results of your campaign. If you're not emailing these people, then there's a very good chance the percentage of people that reply is going to be higher, and you're going to get much better results out of your campaigns.
The other thing that I want you to turn on is block list block list triggers, and make sure to keep a very up-to-date Google Sheet with any hostile prospects across all of your campaigns, all of your workspaces. So, really, really important here, guys, not to email people if they have expressed some disinterest in your cold email. If they've given you the metaphorical finger via via email, you want to make sure that person never gets contacted again because those are the ones that are going to be reporting you as spam, filing complaints, and if that happens, there's no protecting your cold email system. You're just going to have to remove those mailboxes and rewarm them. So, across all your campaigns, if someone's hostile, make sure that you're adding them to your block list. And then you can set up these AI block list triggers. Definitely, definitely do this. Anyone who unsubscribes, add them to a block list. If they are marked as hard no, or if they say one of several words, make sure to move them to a block list so they never get contacted again. Use all of this stuff to your advantage. It really helps.
Now, the other thing to look at here is going to be in the actual campaign. So, right now, I'm in campaigns and I'm in options. I said that Instantly collects a lot of data on the people that we send cold emails to, and we want to leverage all of that data to improve our own results. So, in addition to our own cleaning, which obviously we have to do before every campaign, you want to use something to make sure the email you're sending to is valid. However, it's not going to usually tell you if you're emailing a spam trap. Uh, a spam trap is a mailbox usually designed by one of these blacklist providers or the ESPs themselves. And the only reason somebody would be emailing them is if it's a cold email. So, Instantly uses the data to know which spam traps exist. And if you come down to allow risky emails, you want to make sure that both of these are unchecked. You want to make sure that you're using their data to not email risky emails and that you're using bounce protect.
Now, unfortunately, you can't have the best of both worlds. Instantly's got all of this data that you can utilize to keep your list super clean and make sure that you're not emailing those bad people versus if you're over in Email Bison and you don't have access to all of that data, and they won't kind of clean and protect that list for you. So, you need to be that much better. For that reason, 95% of you watching this video should stay inside of Instantly. It's still the best-in-class platform for consumers to go sign up and use. They do a great job with warm-up. They do a great job with these advanced features that no other other platform offers. However, if you are like a cold email agency and you're trying to create that walled garden and protect yourself, protect your infrastructure, you might want to consider Email Bison. There's going to be a link down below if you're interested.
Now, the next thing that I want to talk about is the thing that I've been focused on probably the hardest over the last month, and that's the mailbox infrastructure. So, we went from pretty much exclusively Google, like 90% Google, and now we're probably moving to more of like a 30% Google. So, that's a huge change. And the way that we're setting up Google mailboxes is now exclusively through Google partner resellers and no longer through those legacy panels. All the legacy panels that we have that are active uh seem to be fine. We're leaving them be, and Google has stopped disabling them. I think it was just a wave, and then they stopped. So, that's good. But in the future, I'm going to make sure that that doesn't happen again because it was a total nightmare. So, now we're just using resellers. Uh, resellers cost anywhere from $2 to $3 a month to to set up Google mailboxes. They're subscription mailboxes. They're officially through Google's platform. And I I resell them as well. So, if you're ever interested in A+ email infrastructure and management, this is pretty much what I've been working on non-stop for the past month.
If you go to leadenj.com/inbox, I'm going to go ahead and bring that down so you can see the URL. You can now come and just sign up for one of three different infrastructure types. You'll see private SMTP, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. And you can kind of toggle between to to learn the difference between these. Uh, and that's what I'm going to be breaking down for you right now. Uh, which which should you be choosing? What are the best providers? and what is the the best way to protect your infrastructure and set yourself up for success.
So, one of the big issues with this past wave of bans is that the domains that were attached to those Google admin accounts were no longer able to be used in Google. The domains are fine. They were warm. We just can't add them to other Google admin panels. So, those ma the domains can't be used to create more Google mailboxes. However, they're still great for other mailboxes, either SMTP or Microsoft Office.
So, one of my big missions over the past month and a half has been building relationships and testing all of the top private SMTP mailbox providers. Now, if you've ever heard me talking crap about SMTP mailboxes in the past, uh, it's typically because they're associated with companies like Infformail and Mail Forge. Companies like this offer like $200 a month for unlimited mailboxes. And that itself should raise some alarm bells. Like, why, why are they able to do that? How are they able to do that? Well, it's because the IP addresses that they're using to send those emails from are trash. And it all comes down to the IP address.
For those of you that have a business and you're sending warm email, promotional emails, newsletters to your list, you're probably not using Google or Microsoft mailboxes, are you? My guess is no. You're probably using something like Mailchimp or Active Campaign, maybe even GHL, but deliverability on those, even to thousands, tens of thousands of people seems to be pretty good. It usually hits the inbox. At least it's expected to. So, if those can do it, not with Google or Microsoft, then how do good SMTP cold email boxes do it? It's got to be doable. It's got to be realistic. It all comes down to the IP address that the email is being sent from. And really great SMTP mailbox providers will do a really good job of protecting their IP range, replacing IP addresses that get burnt or their their trust score drops, and they spend a lot of their time and money just managing that IP range. And the better the company is, usually the more expensive the mailboxes are.
So, what I've been doing over the past month and a half is testing all of these different SMTP mailbox providers and ranking them based off of a couple different factors: ease of setup and use, price, deliverability, and API access. So, I can set them up programmatically for our customers and cancel them programmatically if a payment fails or somebody cancels. So, what have I discovered over the past, let's say, like 45 days? Well, let's go ahead and share my screen and walk you through some of these SMTP solutions and really the two that I'll recommend for you based on if you've got unlimited budget versus if you have a limited budget and want the the best fit.
So, I definitely I'm pushing a lot more toward SMTP for myself and for our clients, high-quality SMTP. And I I see this as kind of the future of cold email because Google and Microsoft, there's nothing that they can do to shut these domains or mailboxes down. Nothing. And they're not going to stop allowing emails from SMTP because that would basically mean they stop allowing emails from Active Campaign and Mailchimp. It's not going to happen.
So, what are some of these SMTP mailbox providers, these companies that are doing a good job with the IP addresses and deliverability? Well, my good friend Tony Baltadano, he's been a deliverability coach inside of The Insiders for over a year now, runs this company called Mission Inbox, which is essentially where I'm putting all of our high-ticket clients, and it's the primary infrastructure being used when you select private SMTP here. The reason for it is it's got the best deliverability. Tony does an amazing job at keeping their IP address range um clean and deliverability and trust high. They also like warn you if you're sending bad cold emails and ruining the IP range. And that's exactly how you protect deliverability for your clients. Good IP addresses with these mailboxes.
Now, the problem with a lot of solutions like this is price. So, if you're used to paying $3 per month per mailbox for Google and Microsoft, or maybe you're got some other solution where you're able to send a ton of of emails from a single mailbox, that's really not going to work with these SMTP providers. So, the first time that I used Mission Inbox like about a year ago, deliverability was excellent, but I was paying like $8 a month per mailbox. And you'll see that when you break out break down the pricing, it gets a little bit crazy.
Now, because Tony's a friend, and I really asked him to step up and help our our insiders program get the prices down. Uh, he does have a discount code that you can use that I will link down in the in the description of this video. I also have a full kind of page for any recommended tools that you want. Just go to leadenj.com/software and it'll bring you here. So, you can see all of the tools that I'm using and get those discounts. But Mission Inbox does an amazing job. Deliverability is great. And if you do want to sign up for their mailboxes and not pay $8 a month per mailbox and just get like five, you can come in to leadenj.com/inbox and we'll set them up for you for $5 per mailbox per month. That way you're not paying the eight or nine per month and have to do the minimum. So, you do have access to be able to do that here.
Now, if that still is a little pricey for you and you want to start with a lower cost solution for SMTP mailboxes, the other solution that I would recommend is a tool called Mailin.ai. Now Mailin is run by another friend named Tor, who's also a very active member of our insiders community. And I've talked extensively to Tor about how they manage their IP addresses and their range. Uh, we've got hundreds of mailboxes with Tor. They do an excellent job, and he's very concerned with deliverability and IP rotation. But the other two reasons that I love Mailin and Mission Inbox are their APIs. So, I can now create mailboxes and domains and set them up all using API programmatically for our clients and turn them off programmatically, which is really helpful when it comes to scaling your cold email infrastructure, and especially if you're running a business where you have to manage thousands of clients. This is just making our life a lot easier. So, they they both have excellent API and excellent deliverability. And with Mailin, you can actually get started. Uh, it's $300 a month for 200 email accounts, but they're actually giving um members of our program 30% off. So, the link to that also going to be down below. And that comes out to about a dollar a month per mailbox, which is unbelievably reasonable for for high-quality SMTP mailboxes.
Okay, so that's on the SMTP side. What about Google Workspace and Microsoft 365? The name of the game now is differentiation and diversification. If you're all all your eggs are in the Google basket and all your Google mailboxes get wiped, you're kind of screwed. But if you're differentiated like 33% 33% 33% and Microsoft mailboxes go down for some reason, you're still protected.
So, with Google Workspace, uh, pricing is still $3.50 per month per mailbox. So, still keeping it super reasonable. Uh, and now we're using official resellers. So, the mailboxes are going to be safe, they're going to be protected. um, and they won't be vulnerable to another mass wave of bans if that happens. The risk with Google, of course, is that they could decide to turn them off any second, which they've been known to do. Whether it's legacy panels or it's reseller accounts, Google, I mean, they have full control. They they can say this domain is doing cold email and just turn it off, and there's nothing that you can do about it. So, differentiate and send good cold emails, and you'll be protected.
I won't talk too much about Google because that's what we we've used historically, but I will talk about the third solution that we're offering now. Uh, and by the way, you don't have to go through my service. You can just go sign up at any of these services that we're using. Uh, and I'm not I'm just going to tell you who we're using. So, it's not gatekept. Uh, and I'm also going to bring you discounts that I've created with the partnership of these founders to make it a lot more accessible for members of my insiders program.
So, for Microsoft 365, we're using a platform called inboxing.com. They create 49 mailboxes for each domain. So, if uh, if you come back to my my form, you'll see each Microsoft 365 mailbox can send five emails per day, and you can get 49 mailboxes for $39 $30 per month. So, I broke it out by how much it costs to send a certain number of emails, um, how much each mailbox and domain costs. So, we're not really setting them up here in intervals of one, two, three, four, five. It's actually going to be intervals of 49.98. Uh, because each single domain here can support 49 mailboxes. If that's confusing, uh, you can go chat with my little my little chat widget or go check out how inboxing's documentation to see more.
So, what I actually did here is I worked out a deal um with Ramon, the owner of inboxing.com, who is amazing, uh, to basically cut the price in half. You can get a single domain with 49 mailboxes for just $30 bucks per month. Whether that whether you do that through us here or you use, you know, again, the code down below to to activate that discount and save money with inboxing.com. And what I recommend is doing a combination of all three of these things. If you're if you're using all three providers, then you're going to be protected because you're diversified. And if anything happens to one, you're still going to have the others.
Now, I just wanted to take a second to reiterate some of the truths that we that remain true for cold email deliverability. There's a lot of questions that people come to me all the time with, you know, does this affect deliverability? Should I do this or this? And sometimes it can get really nuanced. The important thing is to do the fundamentals correctly. And now I'll talk about some of those nuances.
The first big thing that comes up is domain redirects. And this is something that I've been relatively concerned with for a while now. For cold email, you set up all of these secondary domains. Myleadgenenj.com, getleadgenj.com, all all of these domains that are exclusively being used for cold email. And then if you search them, they redirect to your primary domain. Those redirects are somewhat of a fingerprint for cold email. I don't think it's a sure enough thing that they're that they're using it yet to shut down cold email mailboxes or domains. And we've seen no difference using it versus not using it or using redirects versus using domain masking proxies, which is something uh that that some cold email gurus are pushing. I've tried it. Uh, it it works. They don't see any drop in results, but I don't think there's any added benefit yet, but it is still something that we're watching very closely.
And along those lines with like, all right, what could they pin to cold email? Domain redirects. All the hundred domains are redirecting to the same domain. They might be doing cold email. Well, what if a hundred mailboxes have the exact same profile image or variations of the same name? Is that a red flag? Uh, I think it could eventually be, maybe, but I don't think it's certain enough for them to use as a fingerprint for cold email. Not in the same way that the custom tracking domain is. So, in that regard, we're not doing anything to change our practices there. We're still uploading headshots for all of our Google mailboxes. We're still using name variations for all of our mailboxes, and we're not seeing any issues with those practices yet.
The other big thing that remains true is do not track your cold emails. Don't track the opens. Don't track the link clicks. Don't use unsubscribe links. However, if somebody opts out and they want to get out of the email simply because they said stop or remove me or go f yourself, make sure that you get them removed and onto a block list as quickly as possible. Activate all of that AI stuff. Use whatever you can to not email those people again ever from any of your accounts or workspaces.
All right, so this video went a lot longer than I thought it was. If you want to be part of an elite group where we're talking about this in real time, you're getting this information first, be sure to join my Lead Gen Insiders program. That's where all of the experts are, all of the cold email founders, they're in there talking about this stuff. And as members of the Insiders, not only do you get access to the information, but we do a lot of it for you. All of the setup, the fees are waived. There's a ton of resources for you to help enable you through your lead generation journey. So, if you're interested in joining something like that, the link for that is going to be down below as well. I hope you get in there. I coach there every single week. So, I'm looking forward to meeting you.
And if you appreciate this style with just me giving it to you real, just no editing, getting this information to you as fast as possible, I'd love to hear your feedback on it. And if you're like, "We need the editing. We missed the motion graphics." It'll add a couple of weeks next time, but I'll make sure that you get them because I'm going to sit down right now and edit this thing myself. So, I hope you enjoyed this video. I hope you found value in it. If you did, please subscribe, please like, please comment. It means a lot to me.