Illingworth, half of 10M emails came from dead inboxes

Richard Illingworth says his team reviewed one lead-gen agency's setup in October, 5,923 inboxes and just over 10 million emails on record, and found that more than half of those emails came from inboxes the agency had already removed.

The breakdown he posted is where it gets specific. On the agency's biggest account, 76% of the email had been sent from inboxes that no longer existed. On another account, every one of its 67,628 emails came from removed inboxes. In 12 accounts, the inboxes sitting there today had sent less than 60% of that account's total volume. In other words, the sending history was mostly ghosts, and the live inboxes were the latest batch in a rolling replacement cycle.

Fresh inboxes did not fix the reply rate

Illingworth's point is that the churn was not a cure. On that biggest account, human replies fell from 0.51 per 100 emails in March to 0.03 per 100 in September, despite the swaps.

"swapping in fresh inboxes didn't save them," he wrote.

Richard Illingworth

@RCIllingworth

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swapping in fresh inboxes didn't save them.

His explanation is load. Every inbox on the account was still set to 20 or 30 emails a day, against what he says is his own standard of 15. Each new batch got pushed as hard as the one it replaced and landed in the same place.

The frame he hangs it on is Alex Hormozi's "Rule of 100", which Illingworth says he picked up after paying Hormozi over $150,000 and flying to Vegas for coaching. Reach 100 or more prospects a day and judge nothing until day 100. His version of the catch is that the rule only works if your inboxes are still standing on day 100, and a lot of them are not.

For people sending, the number worth stealing here is not 15 a day. Illingworth sells inboxes, so treat 15 as his product's spec rather than an independently tested ceiling, and note this is one agency's data reviewed by the vendor replacing its infrastructure. The question underneath is the one he ends on, how much of your last quarter's volume came from inboxes you have since binned. If most of it did, your reply rate history is measuring a graveyard, not a system. It also squares with his earlier argument that inbox lifespan, not inbox count, is the variable people get wrong.