Breaking News: Outlook Cold Email Deliverability Issues and Solutions

all right breaking news Outlook Major Performance issues I just showed Jesse in a second I'm gonna show Jesse again I'm here with Jesse olette again for another long time uh breaking news we haven't done a breaking news in a while breaking news is quite shocking because Outlook emails are losing deliverability across the board Outlook last time we talked Outlook was the safest one I feel like the last breaking news we did was Zoho dead now we

have to switch to Outlook or it might have even been Google's cracking down on a cold email now we've switched to Outlook so now we're at outlook's dead what do we do Jesse tell us let's talk going on yeah this is uh this is never these ones are never good when we have to wake you up out of bet on these ones and you know wait you're on our time wait you're you're East Coast time zone

right I'm in Nashville yeah it's 8m oh okay never mind sorry we didn't have to wake you up hopefully but anyways yeah no uh you know these ones are never good uh we you know I know we do know people that on the Zoho Apocalypse of cold email lost 8,000 inboxes and that guy is still I mean this is probably a scary day for him of course because he probably switched over to Outlook or you know

I don't know but bro you know what's what's messed up is every time this happens I switch over so became I personally bought like maybe two 300 inboxes like as soon as I heard that I'm like okay we got to do Zoho then it got banned then was it and I bought you know 20 30 40 in 100 inboxes same thing happened and then what just yesterday or maybe a couple weeks ago I uh put that

whole video up about lead hype because I used them to set up 150 you know I spent 5K 5,000 bucks now now we're at $900 a month just to run these uh run these it's wild out there right yeah but ah man it just I just hope it isn't true what we're seeing it the pattern is very interesting you know I have some visibility into this I think uh uh V is going to join us as

well soon uh but basically what we're seeing is the pattern is very interesting it's like you kind of Spike up to like a 15 to 20% bounce and then it just sort of shuts down so that seems to be the pattern it's been happening and we've got we've talked it instantly we've talked to Smart lead we've talked to some other people that are pretty you know uh they're part of this cold email uh group or you

know team I guess if if you really have to go there uh I don't want to but uh you know I know you've wrote written one of the most prolific books on this too Alex uh you know cold eil Manifesto It's one of my favorites so if you haven't bought that book definitely go get it but this is live data this stuff never changes or or always changes like every single day it changes you never know

what you're gonna need to do next but it does appear that there's a problem right now and it does appear that it's based on it starts to go with a really high balance rate like 25 you know it's like I just you know bought a billion credits from my lead uh email validation tool and I know it's working and then all of a sudden you're in like 25 to 30% bounce rate range is what we're seeing

as the pattern at the admin level and that seems to be happening we've found enough panels where this is happening where we believe it's going to start to spread so I don't know what that means uh we're all predicting we're not trying to be uh fearmongers either we never would do that there's no reason to do that anymore of course but uh we saw the same thing on our end uh our cold email Coach Nabil was

seeing the same deliverability issues with some of our email 10K clients and then we saw the same thing um we tested everything we tested uh whether it was the spam words and the domains we tested all the normal deliverability stuff whether it was working with Google accounts whether it was working with Outlook accounts and we we saw man Outlook is Outlook is having major deliverability issues and this is something we predicted because Google's AI is getting

smarter than ever you know it's smarter than it's ever been uh better at reading these emails and Microsoft's AI is actually better than it's ever been at finding these spam emails but it sounds like Google is at least cracking down um what do you think about bre here Google still works fine if you're not a spammer 1.5 million Revenue Agency owner yeah I think you're probably fine we're seeing a lot more of those like uh you

know those lockouts where you've got to sort of type in your um your mobile phone number of course you're going to need a lot of people in your company to find find out how you can only type obviously you can only use the same mobile phone number one time right of course uh but that's something that's something that uh we're seeing right now as uh not as bad though when I look across the problem it's this

20 what the pattern is like I said it's this 25 20 to 25% bounce rate that just sort of starts and I've gotten confirmation we've gotten confirmation now from instantly as well I think they're uh look I'll let them speak for themselves but they've seen it as well so uh you know I think that's represents pretty much uh you know and I know you called this actually uh several months back when we went live before so

um you know hey kudos to you man you got AI is getting smart my my other prediction didn't come true yet where they're gonna go after the domain masking um let's bring in VI CEO of smart lead because I'm sure he's got some data I'm sure he's got something to talk about here how you doing what up guys what up what up thank you good man great to see you how you been fabulous are you seeing

some deliverability issues with your uh with your Outlook Outlook yes 100% um Team actually picked it up three weeks ago um er we tried our best to figure out what the patterns were because I know when we say something people Beyond it should what it should be um we had a bunch of people complained about their um a out accounts being pushed uh spam cop um automatically even right after purchase it turns out it's the um

if you look backwards It's usually the mail servers from uh Outlook second thing we picked up was certain links I still can't give you on which link it is but certain links just the way it worked was when you send the email you get a status 200 from sent but the email actually never left Outlook itself super weird um so when we looked at the graph API and we looked at their the response there was 200

200 202 whatever and we were getting 200 202s right and even when we sent it from the out clant itself we would it would show success but it would never the secondary the leads inbox we were testing with our own inboxes um and the third thing is then you'd have the option which is people would say um what's it called your email's been rejected due to like uh being Mark a Spam or something now obviously the

first thing we we think is oh no something we smartly we need to go fix it but then we were just logging into our own clients like our own actual Outlook accounts and trying to send private accounts and you'd end up getting the same issue so yeah that was that we're being quiet about it but then everyone started speaking so I thought might as well so these are the three pointers that we' picked up as a

pattern um but it's not like the Zoho apocalypse where everything just went to CRA it's just been some people not not everyone I don't know whether it's like tenants or reseller accounts or or what what but yeah anyway it's not I know people would Direct on Smart Le right now as we speak I think there's a little lag I can't tell if it's on my side or not might be on Visa but we have seen people

with direct uh we do know of people that we've talked to that have direct not reseller direct that are seeing it so that's what's kind of changing it a little bit for me right like correct that sort of is what would make you know you might want to consider what you're doing right now obviously you never want to send people that oh we lost Jesse so what is send to people that are always relevant you never

want to send spam emails that's not good what would be the the solution here so let's say we do want to ramp up you know we want to send 100,000 cold emails a month we do want to work at scale maybe we're using AI we're using clay and all these automations to uh you know to customize the campaigns a bit we are using spin tax in best practices what is the what's our best chance for deliverability

that won't get banned in three months you know what are we able what are we most confident in investing in in terms of a cold email platform right now uh segregate um Outlook G look I I personally think this is a very temporary thing um they're just trying to go ahead and rate limit a few things just to sort of and then it goes back to normal um the only reason why I'm completely unfaced by this

is because uh Google's done this I don't know how many times um to us being everyone in this space and it just roll back to the same so I think AR just having a moment give it a couple of weeks and we'll be back what do you think about my um I'm not sure if smart Le has this or not or if it's just instantly but the deliverability matching you think that could be the solution so

sending Google accounts to Google accounts out you do have that okay we we B that in first yeah yeah so you brought that in first amazing is that is that the solution here uh yeah um when Jesse helped us device that that the goal was basically do MX record checks um to basically Google to Google and Outlook to Outlook but I don't think that's a fix over here the fix is not that the messages on the

the receiving is is like Outlook to Outlook is doing better or Gmail to Gmail is doing better it's just that outlook's just not happy sending some emails to people um but you do good point um now that you've said it I remember when we did a test with rames Outlook to Outlook did land now that you say it I'm gon have to check this I've not checked this now yet this is a good point no no

no not that not that he raised it that's a good point I completely check it could be the smartest Solution that's a good call I'm just wondering what what do we do because like you know like you're you're processing millions and millions of emails a month I think billions now you said yeah so what like we can't just throw these domains away you know what are we supposed to do no no no um so so to

to keep running with what we have right now two points so one hit up Outlook and ask them to move your IP if you're on a burnt IP you can easily do that using a reverse DNS check um for anyone doing this just type in uh put in your domain and I think it's on NS lookup and ask it to give you your a record once you get your a record copy the a record and basically

uh you can use the aor Corde if you want and use the aor Corde to go ahead and get your um your mail server uh IP and then just do what's my IP address or something to see whether that's actually pointing to your mic uh sry Gmail and you can do a very basic Blacklist check on either any of the tools smart lead has or um the Open Market has multipl and then you should be able

to see if you're blacklisted or not and you should be good to go so that's one um and two uh ESP matching three uh diversify to Outlook um Gmail and the third party SMTP provid seeing it um just to diversify a lot of these uh third party SMTP tools just FYI for everyone are just white label Solutions off or you know um enom so it's not like they've recreated their something scratch out of the world so

there's always a a chance that you end up in a bad pool with them as well but that that's what I would uh I would say right now so that you're just not burning your entire infrastructure that's what I'd be worried about too which is basically the the uh the next question would be do we all switch to custom SMTP Solutions is that the ab okay absolutely not absolutely you you think we're still safer absolutely absolutely

and someone keeps posting this message on our slack saying what's are these tools better than not looking I'm like they've been doing for 25 years calm down these guys know what they're doing like the these new sntv tools have just popped in like someone's running an l TD or something chill they they have no clue what's coming out their ways just let out Contin the good ones are going to be the ones that you don't hear

like the the private they're expensive they're probably ran by people who really know what they're doing you know they're gonna be I mean obviously if you had a really nice neighborhood you wouldn't want to move uh you know the wrong people into that neighborhood if really I mean you know you you want to have like you know if you're there with your kids and your family and you're like you know retired or whatever I don't know

whatever is you probably don't want to move next to the frat house that you know or like you know I mean that wouldn't make sense right or you might want to I will add to this point though like I mean regardless of whether you're using any platform in the world instantly is great lless is decent we're we're good every tool in the market you're going to be seeing something happen odd over here um and it's not

to them it's more so using resellers be particularly careful um not and's Cousin um uh if if it's a reseller you want to be careful because shared reseller um tenants are an issue because I think Jesse pointed this out almost a year ago um I think with you Alex where we did look up seeing the or guides were being attached um on the headers uh which effectively gave people the the relay back saying that this is

being sent from the same um infrastructure so um one thing I will say though when we were doing those tests 100% deliverability whenever we did plane text um uh every one has it I don't know if everyone turn the openes instantly has it for a lot of yeah and smartly has it as well um so I would say that is a clean way because like I said at the start of this call the one pattern we

found was something to do with links being added the second calendly links were there or some other random links were there uh it was weird I just didn't get it but yeah so you're you're saying for deliverability none of this will be an issue if we just send plain text from the very small test okay right from the very small test I've done when we were like we were scratching our heads trying to figure out what

the hell is happening the one thing that we realized is when you remove uh any sort of open um I don't know about links per se because we did the cing thing it was weird but when we removed open trackers it was working perfectly fine now we did obviously do custom domain tracking and we even custom domained our own custom domain like a three-way um forward Loop and some sometimes it worked sometimes it didn't work so

I feel like the CDT that you use also makes a massive difference um if they pick it up as a a Spam link or whatever keep in mind as well so if you do want to do opens make sure that you are maybe testing across three to four different custom domains to con one is giving you the best results that's honestly the max I can tell you right now because that's the limits of the testing we've

done I've not done more than that the weird part that I'm seeing about this one seems to be the fact that it's the campaigns can still run to some places but other places they're just like hard bouncing places that you you test the email and you're like that's a real email so that's where it's weird uh you know you can continue I'm trying to do a little more investigation on it I got a couple of campaigns

that I've looked at that look you know they look like ones that you'd want to consider as part of the anomaly right like of what's going on and they're all in the same tenant you know they kind of have the same pattern maybe they were sending the same email type you know helping get those in the inbox but the one thing I'm seeing is like uh the ones that are there's other campaigns that are running that

have none of that issue and they're on a different tenant right like so there's like a it's a weird sort of a weird it's tough to tell which one is actually going to be the problem but I think it's starting to get it's widening more than shrinking is what it I'm seeing right that makes sense it would it would make sense as they are yeah backing down on all these spam issues right it should get harder

and harder with time yes by by Nature uh I do note I like this is me speaking way out of line over here but um with the some of some of these SMTP providers I mean the warmed up mailboxes Etc stuff they did come off the azure Network um so that's as well maybe they they this was a loophole that's a bunch of people found they ran through the Azure Network we know some popular ones that

have done that and this may be the counterintuitive element of this where that's why the domains are not being blacklisted it's it's always the the mail servers not the web servers even per se um if if you do the roll back checks so um I believe I did that for a customer yesterday who you know came down saying yo what's happening my numbers are like like 80 90% opens and then literally past two days everything that

I do just whatever obviously it was Outlook turns out that was the issue uh he flipped it across everything was fine so um yeah but anyway look let's let's without worrying about what is let's work about a solution my honest opinion is if you got only Outlook sorry no I think there's just a little lag uh you can finish it your statement there yeah yeah if you're doing only Outlook and you don't want to lose the

momentum no problem at all just convince your clients for a couple of weeks maybe till second week of first week of June that we have PL text no choice there right and if you are split across uh you're split across Gmail and Outlook um quest for us to just go ahead and put a bit more energy onto the Outlook accounts and roll back on sorry a bit more energy on the Gmail account and roll back on

the account and and if you're the early kicks offs yeah when we say plain text we mean no unsubscribe links even no no Links at all right no no no nothing just just just plain text um and obviously you need to follow some layer of gdpr compliance of opt out so you need to put in that text at the bottom saying if this isn't for you please you know let me know and you know I um

if you have to put links just make sure you've done custom domain tracking and you've conf confirm that your cdts work yeah you can't host it on yeah you can host it we've got our own thing coming up in a few weeks but before that you can look at Glock apps email on acid there's several email placement tools that will help you give a good understanding of Outlook uh Outlook accounts deliverability um and as Alex rightfully

put out try ESP matching um if you're selling to Fortune 5,000 I think some 70% of all Fortune 5,000 is is on Outlook anyway so so um it's not the end of the world it's just some maintance that we all need to we know the world that we're in yeah I mean that's it's getting harder and harder this used to be so easy bro when we started it was like you could send 20 Cold emails a

week and build a multi-million I'm so mad um but it is you know you know Outreach 9 like 2000 year 2000 you just Crush whatevered everything got replied wasn't the 90s this wasn't 2000 was like 10 years ago not even yep okay um BR says they sales emails at all seeing no issues past three years BR if you're selling if you're sending low volume cold emails and not mass uh sending I understand how you're not seeing

issues we're high volume senders here you know as as it's all uh if I just sorry I think again Alex there a bit of a lag but if I may just yeah Jess is Alex Dro uh there's a little bit of lag I think between you two for some reason I'm not sure what yeah go ahead I just jump into what you've exactly said Alex even if it's not um uh not the general thing that I

usually tell people is if it's working for you do what you're doing like don't listen to any that I've said um like if it's working for you do it like there'll be people who tell me hey I send 400 emails a day per mailbox and I'm crushing it I'm like cool keep doing it don't don't listen to what I'm saying do do what you're doing ignore me yeah at that point because you're doing it better yeah

yeah that's totally true come on to the live streams our job just to provide patterns uh and and their jobs is to go ahead and do what they have to so if it's working for them don't listen to anyone cool let's run through it then an experienced developer said there's no solution um okay so if you go back a little bit you can hear what the solution is right now it's plain text emails it's uh using

multiple uh senders so send some from Google some from Outlook you could maybe even use custom smtps although it sounds like there there's a strong warning against that you might want to just I'm seeing it I'm seeing it pretty you know I'm watching the stuff pretty closely and I I just I see this pattern right now that's happening and it's it's gonna go deeper and wider I think I think there's a little bit of it's pretty

obvious what it what's happening on that and then unal says what to Omni cold email sending actually SAS in general is very hard to to build my the two tools I use now for sending are instantly and smartly okay so that's that's gonna be it I think we covered uh I think we covered everything when it comes to Outlook we got the Solutions in here so any final thoughts any parting words on this one the only

thing weird about it is some of these campaigns are some of the weirdest stats I've ever seen where they're high bounce but really really like like nor normal reply rates which is very odd that's the part that's sort of scary actually is like you'll go in you'll be like a it's a 7% reply rate but it's a 20% bounce rate I don't know what I the emails that you're sending are just good emails it's just that

I think it's working it's just a matter of like you got to figure out like okay well what is my real bounce right like what are they actually counting as a bounce so that's one of the things I am seeing right now that across these anytime I see this pattern that I'm talking about where it's like that 15 to 20% bounce the reply rates seem to still be decent you think the bounce rates are going to

be false reported somehow which case how do we even that they they they definitely are I just want to if you're using smart lead the bounce rates are not element of your email actually bouncing on the leads perspective but it's the Outlook account that you own actually rejecting it internally like of sending you're going want to use the email validation with uh with smart lead and everything I mean I know they're bringing that in in the

next couple of weeks so that's awesome are we um reducing our volume per account what do you think below 25 emails per inbox are we sticking with 60 what what is our recommendation here per inbox here under 40 40 under 40 yeah same thing we in for 30 40 perb yeah good okay so nothing nothing much has changed it's just like we gotta watch out nothing much only thing I will add for us is maybe is

a little bit so um in if you're doing 5 minutes block it to like 15 16 minutes if you can load it through the the whole day instead of like a chunk of the day um space as you can because if these things are bouncing you don't want them to bounce like really hard you just want them to bounce over you know um sustained periods um that that's what I would recommend cool all right thanks for

being here VI have uh guys go check out smart lead if you want to go to Alex burman.com tools you can use my smart lead link over there to sign up uh Jesse guys go check out lead magic thanks for being here and Che out gon too might as well promote than for having us sir appreciate it sure