What a cold email owes the person who gets it

Nobody asked for a cold email. The person reading it owes the sender nothing, and the sender owes them a few things in return for the interruption. We built these in as rules the system cannot skip.

It says who is writing, and how to make it stop

Every email carries the sender's name, company and postal address, and one line: reply "no" and you will not hear from us again. That reply is acted on by the system, not by a person remembering to. It also holds for every other company we work for: one "no" closes the door to all of them.

It does not pretend to know what it does not

Before the later emails, we read the company's own public website and keep what we found alongside the page it came from. If the site says little, the email says something true about companies of that kind and does not dress it up as an observation.

The two problems we raise are offered as things often seen in companies like theirs. They are a guess with a stated basis, and they are written that way.

It is short, and there are three of them

Three emails across eleven days, then silence. We do not track opens: the count is unreliable and the tracking itself harms delivery.

When someone answers, the rest of the sequence stops at once. An answer is read for what the person actually said. A hopeful reading of a polite brush-off is still a brush-off.