field notes3 posts

The briefing room.

Notes on cold email deliverability, sequence design, engagement scoring, and getting outbound working without an enterprise stack. Written to be useful, and to be quoted.

latestDeliverability field guideSep 4, 2026

When Google starts filtering you

TL;DR. Gmail rarely blocks outright. It downgrades placement first, so your send still reports as delivered while nobody sees it. Diagnose with a per-provider split of your own open rates, confirm in Postmaster Tools if you have the volume for it, then cut volume and fix targeting before you touch DNS.

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series

2 parts
Deliverability field guide
Authentication, domain warming, bounce handling, and what to do when a provider starts filtering you.
updated Sep 4, 2026

Sep 2, 2026How to warm a new sending domain in 30 daysA new domain has no reputation, so ramp it deliberately: authenticate first, start at 10–20 sends per mailbox per day to your most engaged contacts, and roughly double each week for four weeks. Stop and fix the list if hard bounces pass 2% or complaints pass 0.1%.Deliverability
Aug 21, 2026A/B testing a broadcast without wrecking your sampleTest one variable at a time, send to a hold-out slice rather than the whole list, and wait for the opens to actually finish arriving. Below roughly 1,500 recipients per variant a 5-point difference in open rate is not distinguishable from noise, and declaring a winner from it is worse than not testing.Broadcasts

Run outbound from your own mailbox.

Sequences, broadcasts, and engagement tracking, self-serve, no contract.

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