How the Cold Outreach Filter Surprised Us(From Auto-Blocking Everything to Actually Finding Good Emails)

It's sad, but true: I'm obsessed with email. Most people will find this to be nothing short of pathetic, but I can explain.

I've always tended to be organized; I don't like clutter, or hoarding things, or just messiness in general. Early in my career, I fully committed to maintaining inbox zero, and using my inbox as a to-do list.

But being a jack-of-all-trades at Zendrive (especially during my stint as Chief of Staff), I started getting dozens of cold outreach emails a day:

(That last one is real. And yes, it is the most unhinged cold email I have ever received.)

I would never read them; in fact, I would instantly use the "mark as spam and block" keyboard shortcut in Gmail, almost subconsciously. But because there is not a native, deterministic way to filter this out, it's a game of constant whack-a-mole, and has only gotten worse with AI-generated outreach.

When we built out the Cold Outreach label in Tiko Mail, I figured it was a decent way to protect my inbox, and it was. I no longer need to block anyone or mark anything as spam, which is a nice small win.

The Surprise

Out of curiosity, I started scanning the Cold Outreach folder, once a week for 3-5 minutes. Just in the last 2 weeks, I:

• Was contacted by someone I interviewed years ago, and we had a great chat about building with LLM tools;
• Scheduled a podcast appearance for a show that actually makes sense for me (and wasn't trying to sell me a timeshare).

To my surprise, our Cold Outreach label actually created the conditions for me to respond to the most interesting cold emails, rather than automatically discard everything before reading it.