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RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.

We’ve just crossed into 2026, which means we’ve got roughly four years until 2030. Personally, I think that’s being generous! 

Because if there’s one thing I’ve seen consistently over the past few years — and especially over the last twelve months - it’s this: cold email is becoming harder, riskier, less effective, and more damaging than most businesses are willing to admit.

And yet, so many teams are doubling down on it.

Before we get into why cold email is dying (and what to do instead), we need to clear something up first. Because one of the biggest problems in this space is that people use “email” as a catch-all term for things that are fundamentally different.

Email marketing, external comms, and cold email are not the same thing

I get approached all the time by people who want “help with email”. But what they actually mean varies wildly.

Email marketing is permission-based. Someone has opted in, there is expectation, there is context and there is an existing (or intentionally forming) relationship. The goal is to nurture, educate, remind, and stay present over time.

External communications sit slightly wider. This is everything that shows up in the inbox as part of doing business: transactional emails, account notifications, review requests, sales follow-ups, support updates and event reminders. These emails are still expected, even if they’re not always welcomed.

Cold email is neither of those things.

Cold email is unsolicited outreach. It is unexpected by definition. It is not relationship-led and is not permission-based. And it does not operate under the same psychological, technical, or ethical conditions as email marketing.

Where I sit and why I don’t box myself into “email marketing”, is that my work is about the inbox  and audience experience as a whole. That means understanding how all external communications collide, overlap, and compound in one place. It’s also why CRM work sits so naturally alongside this thinking. Because from a human point of view, there is no such thing as “marketing emails” and “sales emails” and “system emails”.

There is just your brand or business showing up in my inbox.

And cold email fundamentally breaks that experience.

The panic phase: when cold email stops working

Over the last year, I’ve had more conversations than I can count with B2B leaders and marketers who are panicking.

Their pipelines are drying up, their outbound isn’t converting into any replies or results, their cold email “used to work” and now it doesn’t. Open rates are collapsing, replies are non-existent and VERY hard to come by. Spam complaints are creeping up, domains are burning, and teams are confused and stuck. 

And the response is almost always the same: send more, automate harder, buy better data, tweak the copy, switch tools.

But the reality is much simpler and much more uncomfortable.

Cold email is failing because inboxes, inbox providers, and humans have fundamentally changed how they treat unsolicited messages.

Inbox providers do not want cold email

Let’s start with the technical reality.

Google, Microsoft, Yahoo (and the rest_, none of them want cold email in their ecosystems. It degrades user experience, it increases risk, itopens the door to phishing, fraud, and abuse. And it actively undermines trust in the inbox as a communication channel.

Cold email directly clashes with sender guidelines. New senders, new domains, no prior relationship, high similarity language, low engagement. All of these are red flags 🚩

Spam filters are no longer simple rule-based systems. They are learning systems, where they analyse behaviour, patterns, language, reputation, and response over time. And cold email triggers almost every negative signal they’re trained to look for.

I see this in my own inbox every single day. Hundreds of cold emails land in spam, one or two occasionally sneak through — and when they do, they all sound the same. The same structures, the same tone, the same “quick question” and the same false familiarity.

Deliverability alone is enough to make cold email unsustainable at scale. But that’s only half the story.

Even when cold email reaches the inbox, it fails the human test

Even when cold email reaches the inbox, it fails the human test

Let’s say you beat the filters. Let’s say your email lands in the inbox.

Now you’re up against human behaviour.

Cold email is unwanted by default. Even when it’s relevant, even when the timing is decent and even when the offer isn’t terrible. It is still an interruption in a task-driven environment.

Professional inboxes are ruthless! People triage based on sender recognition first, subject line second. And cold email fails both tests. You are unknown, untrusted, and uninvited.

On top of that, cold email has trained us all to expect manipulation. We recognise the patterns instantly. Our brains predict what’s coming before we open. And most of the time, we don’t bother opening at all.

The few times cold email “works”, it’s almost always because:

• the person is already problem-aware
• they are already in-market
• they have already heard of you or your category

Which brings us to the uncomfortable truth.

Cold email only ever reaches the 5%

In B2B especially, around 95% (this is different per business but let's say 95% for the sake of this) of your audience is not ready to buy at any given moment. They are your future market, not your current one.

Cold email only ever converts the minority who are already looking. That’s why teams can send hundreds of thousands of emails, get a handful of leads, and convince themselves it “works”.

What they don’t see is the damage underneath.

• The trust erosion
• The negative brand memory
• The spam complaints
• The silent blocking
• The deliverability decay

Cold outreach doesn’t just fail quietly, it leaves a residue.

And sometimes, your email is the one that tips someone over the edge. They’ve already had five similar emails that day. Yours is the sixth. You’re the one they mark as spam. You’re the one that trains the filter against you.

That’s the risk most teams never account for.

Cold email is becoming expensive, not cheap

There’s also a myth that cold email is “cheap”. It isn’t anymore.

To do cold outreach at scale now, you need:

• multiple domains (never your primary) 
• constant warm-up
• cold outreach platformsand tools 
• deliverability tooling
• ongoing list hygiene and data acquistion
• data validation and verification tools 
• copy that avoids triggers
• legal and compliance oversight
• time, patience, and acceptance of loss

All of that investment for increasingly diminishing returns.

And then there’s the ethical grey area, scraped data and purchased lists (yuck) plus questionable consent. You might be comfortable with it, your audience might not be.

I sit on a fence here, and I’m honest about that. I’m not anti-cold email in principle. I’m a business owner. I understand the pressure to grow and I understand budget constraints. I understand needing to tell more people what you do.

But I am very clear about this: cold email is high risk, high effort, low trust.

What’s coming next will finish the job

If deliverability and human behaviour haven’t killed cold email already, the next wave probably will.

We’re already seeing:

• advanced business spam filters (Mimecast, Barracuda, Proofpoint)
• inbox-level cold email detection
• AI-driven sender analysis
• automatic routing of “unknown senders” away from primary inboxes

We’re also seeing new tools and extensions that quietly sort cold email into folders people never open. The emails still “deliver”, but they effectively disappear.

This is only going to accelerate. Inbox providers will always adapt faster than the tools promising to “get around” them. That’s how ecosystems work. There will come a point, and I don’t think it’s far off, where cold email simply isn’t viable for most businesses.

So what should you do instead?

First, if you are going to do cold email, treat it like a separate function, not part of your email marketing programme.

• Never send it from your primary domain
• Never mix it with your permission-based comms
• Never rely on volume
• Never expect it to build trust

Use it minimally, target it tightly, accept that it’s slow, fragile, and risky.

But more importantly: invest in inbound.

Inbound compounds, cold outreach burns.

Email marketing will always outperform cold email because it is expected. It is chosen. It is permission-based. It works with human psychology, not against it.

If you want sustainable growth, the work is slower:

• building audience
• building trust
• building value
• building memory

Social, content, SEO, paid where appropriate. And email as the connective tissue that holds it all together.

An email address is not a gateway to a sale! That era is so over and so 2005. 

Email works when it is earned, not taken.

Cold email isn’t dead (yet). But it’s dying. And by 2030, I’d be very surprised if it resembles anything like what people are relying on today.

• The inbox has moved on
• The humans have moved on

It’s time for businesses to do the same.

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RE:markable is the weekly email about emails. Dropping the latest email marketing news, updates, insights, free resources, upcoming masterclasses, webinars, and of course, a little inbox mischief.