0 of 12 to Outlook inbox, SPF and DKIM passing
Luckforest sent 400 cold emails for zero replies with warmup at 100% and authentication passing, then a placement test showed every Outlook inbox was junk. Removing links and the price got 18 of 18 to inbox on retest.
Read the whole week in one go496 emails, 7 interested, and a fight over infra cost
Landing in the inbox
Luckforest: 0 of 12 to Outlook inbox despite passing SPF, DKIM, DMARC
Luckforest sent 400 cold emails and got zero replies, then ran a placement test that showed 23 of 24 reaching the Gmail inbox and 0 of 12 reaching Outlook. He says 44% of the list was Outlook.
warmup scores and authentication tell you nothing about where your email lands
Campaigns and numbers
Feldman says an offer switch took a client from one reply to 125 leads
Jay Feldman says a client selling AI content services had run two cold email campaigns and got one half-interested reply, then changed who the offer was for. The team pointed him at coaches, authors and speakers, and Feldman reports 8 interested leads on day one, 13 on day two, 125 in the first month, at a 6.42% reply rate.
If outreach gets silence, test the offer and audience before adding volume.
Workflows and tooling
Christian maps one GTM engineer's day from domain to live campaign
Christian published what one GTM engineer on his team gets done in a day using Claude Code, Hermes in Slack, the Clay CLI, n8n and a folder of skill .md files.
In 2023 that was a week for 4 people and a VA writing "personalized" first lines.