2026-05-28
AI pause cold emailing infrastructure needs a lot of improvement
Disclaimer
Main
- Why I am even thinking about this topic?
- My first reaction to this is what the fuck is this? I don't mean this as an insult, they're still ahead of 99.99999% of the population. But holy fuck this needs a lot of work. It is so bad it is making me want to start a cold emailing org lmao. (Note to self - Think more here)
- I have sent thousands of cold DMs/emails over the past year, I also wish I had a more systematised process for it.
- Who should be receiving the emails?
- (only listing people not listed in the Pause AI list)
- Powerful people
- Taiwanese politicians - most important stakeholder
- Billionaires in all the listed countries
- Top social media influencers (youtubers, tiktokers) in all the listed countries
- Leaders of intelligence / military in all the listed countries
- Public
- Students of top engineering colleges in all the listed countries. Employees of top tech companies in all the listed countries. Olympiad or competitive contest winners in all the listed countries. (As of today, the AI pause movement only knows how to convince young male technical atheist nerds who aren't locked into any life plan yet. So they might as well lean into that strength until they can crack scalable persuasion for other audiences.)
- Who should be sending the emails?
- Asking random people to sit and scrape emails is super inefficient.
- Any sane human (famous or not) is going to read the same email a maximum of maybe 5 times before they just by default ignore every further email that mentions the same topic. You don't need to send 1000 emails to the same person, you need to send them maybe 5 emails with the weight of 1000 people behind that email.
- Ideally the top 5-6 anti-ASI youtubers and anti-ASI politicians should be sending these emails. But these people are super busy, so someone else should build the emailing infrastructure and provide them with a one-click solution.
- How to evade spam filters?
- If you take what I said above literally, I am asking the top anti-ASI youtubers and politicians to send literally millions of emails. (Emailing all students of top 1000 QS ranking colleges is already a million addresses.)
- Twitter and gmail spam filters are secret.
- That being said, the primary thing all these spam filters track is open rates. Possibly they also track click rates for outbound links. If you are sending similar-ish content from the same sender address to thousands of receiver addresses, you will only be allowed to do so if a significant fraction of these addresses are actually opening the email/DM, and maybe even clicking outbound links inside that email or DM.
- You can evade this somewhat by renting residential proxy IPs with good reputations at the IPs (see websites like IProyal), and setting up DNSSEC and all that shit (go search hackernews for the whole process).
- But ultimately, gmail and twitter probably do have AI reading the content of the emails/DMs. If enough emails/DMs are sending very similar content, even from different accounts and IP addresses and DNSes, with low open rates, this will eventually get all of them blocked.
- All this matters only if you are sending millions of emails, it doesn't matter if you are sending thousands of emails.
- No, seriously, how do I actually evade spam filters?
- The actual way to evade spam filters is to design a well-targeted political campaign. Understand any specific target audience so extremely well such that you can know, even before you send the emails, that your emails will have a high open rate.
- The thing is, if your political campaign is actually that well-targeted, it will spread on its own via social media, you won't need to send many cold emails.
- How to scrape millions of email addresses?
- This is literally a multi-billion dollar question, I'm not even going to get into it here.
- Who should scrape millions of email addresses?
- One group of people should scrape all the email addresses and provide them to everyone else in private, on request.
- Asking people to repeatedly scrape the same addresses is a huge waste of effort.
- Also, more importantly, if you ask everyone to scrape email addresses on their own, this increases user friction and most people won't actually do it.
- How to reduce user friction?
- One org should manage all the schleps of cold emailing infrastructure, and then an entirely different person (ideally an anti-ASI youtuber or politician) should be actually sending the emails via a one-click solution.
- See also: Paul Graham on schlep blindness
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