Cold email and deliverability

Cold email is legal in the US if you follow CAN-SPAM, but many other countries require consent or a narrow exception before the first message, and the law that applies is the recipient's, not yours. CAN-SPAM rules for B2B cold email covers the US requirements. Outside the US, read cold email in Canada under CASL, cold email in the UK under PECR, GDPR cold email rules for B2B and cold email in Australia under the Spam Act. The table below summarises each guide; it is not legal advice.

Germany is stricter than most of Europe: even B2B cold email needs prior consent. See is cold email legal in Germany.

Send about 20 to 50 cold emails a day from each warmed-up mailbox, and add mailboxes rather than raising that number. How many cold emails per day per inbox explains why the providers' hard caps are abuse ceilings, not safe volumes, and how to work out how many mailboxes a target volume needs. New mailboxes need weeks of gradual ramp-up first: how to warm up a new sending domain gives the schedule. If many of your prospects use Microsoft mail, check Outlook's bulk sender requirements as well.

Cold email lands in the inbox when the domain is authenticated, the volume is low and steady, the list is verified and recipients rarely mark it as spam. The email deliverability checklist for small teams walks through authentication, list hygiene and monitoring. Outlook bulk sender requirements covers what Microsoft now expects of high-volume senders, and email warm-up covers new domains. Keep cold outreach on a separate domain so a bad week doesn't hurt your main business email, and watch reply and spam-complaint rates each week: a drop in replies is often the first sign that messages have started landing in spam.

To check your numbers against others', cold email benchmarks gives published reply rates and the bounce and spam-complaint thresholds mailbox providers enforce.

A cold email sequence that gets replies is short, relevant to the person's role, and spaced over a couple of weeks, with each step adding something new. Cold email sequences for small business covers step count, timing and stop rules. AI cold email personalisation explains which details are worth personalising at scale and which just add risk. Write to one person about one problem, make the ask small (a reply or a short call), and stop the sequence as soon as someone replies or opts out. Keep each sequence within a safe daily volume per inbox, and check the law for every country on your list before it starts.

The main cold email tools differ in how they charge: by the number of mailboxes, by contacts or by credits for lead data, so the right one depends on how many inboxes you run. Pricing guides: Instantly pricing, credits and mailboxes, Smartlead pricing and real cost and lemlist pricing for email vs multichannel. Head-to-heads: Instantly vs Smartlead, lemlist vs Instantly and Saleshandy vs Instantly. If none fits, see Instantly alternatives, Smartlead alternatives and lemlist alternatives.

For the rest of the market side by side, cold email software pricing compared prices Apollo, Reply.io, Woodpecker, Saleshandy, Mailshake and the three above on the same basis.