Today’s plays › All plays › Cold email

Don’t let an AI SDR send 1,000 unchecked emails a day from your main domain

Picked and checked by Olga Pearson, SalesUpLevel

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Run it before your 10am

1. 01Send cold email from a separate domain, never the one your invoices and customer emails come from.
2. 02This week, read 20 emails your AI actually sent, not the samples you approved at setup.
3. 03Put a fact check between draft and send: every claim about the prospect needs a source. Use the prompt below.
4. 04Watch your spam complaint rate in Google Postmaster Tools and keep it well under 0.3%.
5. 05Judge the program on meetings that become real opportunities, not on replies.

Here’s a cold email draft and the research it was based on.

List every claim the email makes about the prospect (their tools, news, growth, hiring, anything they said). For each claim, quote the exact line of research that supports it, with its date. Mark any claim with no support, or a source older than [6 months], as REMOVE.

Then rewrite the email using only the supported claims.

[Paste draft]
[Paste research]

Watch out for

• Ashutosh sells a verified-outreach product, so this story is also a pitch. The industry stats he cites aren’t his own measurements.
• The lesson still stands: AI can be wrong in perfect grammar, and nobody notices until a VP does.
• Your sending domain protects every email your company sends. Don’t risk it on cold outreach.
• In the EU and some other places, cold email has stricter consent rules. Check yours before you scale.

Source: Ashutosh Singhal, Ashutosh Singhal on Substack, Apr 29, 2026. Results are as reported by the source; we did not measure them.

Run these next

• 02 · Cold emailMine your old cold email campaigns for what actually booked meetings
• 01 · Prospecting & researchTurn a target account’s job postings into your reason to reach out
• 08 · CRM hygieneClean your CRM in an afternoon, but make AI check for open deals before anything is deleted