these prompts help you figure out why your emails aren't landing and what to do about it. i've diagnosed deliverability issues for over 2,000 customers. the answers are almost always in the infrastructure layer.
When to use this: your emails are landing in spam or promotions and you're not sure why. this prompt walks through every possible cause in order of likelihood.
My cold emails are landing in spam. Walk me through a complete diagnostic to figure out why. Ask me questions one at a time and narrow down the cause based on my answers.
Start with the most common causes and work toward the less obvious ones.
Diagnostic sequence:
1. Authentication — Are SPF, DKIM, and DMARC all passing? (check via MXToolbox)
2. Domain age — How old are the sending domains? (under 30 days = likely cause)
3. Warmup status — Were inboxes warmed for 14+ days before cold outreach?
4. Provider setup — Google only? Outlook only? Or split?
5. Sending volume — How many emails per inbox per day? (above 20 = red flag)
6. Bounce rate — What's the current bounce rate? (above 1.5% = problem)
7. List quality — When was the list last verified? What tool?
8. Copy check — Any links in email 1? Spam trigger words? Identical copy across all sends?
9. Inbox reputation — Has the domain been used for cold email before? Any previous flags?
For each question:
- Ask me for the specific data
- Tell me what a healthy answer looks like
- Tell me what a concerning answer looks like
- If I give a concerning answer, tell me the fix immediately before moving to the next question
Once you've gone through all 9 areas, give me a summary:
- Root cause (most likely)
- Priority fixes ranked 1-2-3
- Timeline to expect improvement after implementing the fixes
Pro tip: people blame copy for spam issues far more often than they should. infrastructure problems cause the vast majority of spam placement. if your authentication isn't passing or your domains are brand new and unwarmed, the best-written email on the planet will still land in junk.
When to use this: your reply rates are dropping but your emails aren't going to spam. silent throttling is the biggest invisible threat to outbound performance right now. a vast majority of teams don't realise it's happening until their pipeline completely dries up.
Help me determine if my cold email inboxes are being silently throttled. Silent throttling is when email providers deliberately slow, stagger, or quietly deprioritise sends to protect inboxes from suspicious behaviour.
The dangerous part is it often starts invisibly. No bounce notifications. No spam folder placement. Emails just quietly stop arriving.
Ask me these diagnostic questions:
1. Has my reply rate dropped more than 30% in the last 2 weeks with no change to copy or targeting?
2. Am I seeing emails marked as "sent" in my sequencer but prospects saying they never received them?
3. Have I recently increased my sending volume by more than 50% in a short period?
4. Am I sending from fewer than 2 providers (Google and Microsoft)?
5. What's my current sending velocity? (emails per hour per inbox)
6. Have I checked my domain reputation on Google Postmaster Tools?
7. Am I seeing a higher-than-normal delay between "sent" and "delivered" timestamps?
For each answer, tell me:
- Whether this indicates throttling
- The severity (mild, moderate, severe)
- The immediate action to take
If throttling is confirmed, give me a recovery plan:
- How to reduce volume safely without killing active campaigns
- How to redistribute across providers
- Timeline for recovery
- Monitoring metrics to watch during recovery
Pro tip: i know 20+ cold emailers who got wiped out by silent throttling in 2025. the problem is that your analytics can look completely normal while your emails are quietly disappearing. if your reply rates drop and nothing else has changed, check for throttling before you touch anything else.
When to use this: your bounce rate is above 1.5% and you need to figure out why and bring it down before it damages your domain reputation.
My cold email bounce rate is too high. Help me diagnose the cause and create a plan to bring it under 1% within 2 weeks.
My current data:
- Current bounce rate: [YOUR BOUNCE RATE — e.g. 3.2%]
- Total emails sent this week: [NUMBER]
- Verification tool used: [Reoon / MillionVerifier / ZeroBounce / None]
- When list was last verified: [DATE or "never"]
- List source: [Apollo / Sales Navigator / Clay / Purchased list / Scraped / Other]
- Are you skipping or separating catch-all emails? [YES / NO]
Analyse my situation and give me:
1. The likely cause of high bounces based on my answers
2. Immediate actions (what to do today)
3. This-week actions (what to change in my process)
4. Ongoing prevention (how to keep bounce rate permanently under 1%)
5. Whether I should pause active campaigns while fixing this (and for how long)
Key benchmarks to reference:
- Under 1%: healthy
- 1-1.5%: caution zone, needs attention
- Above 1.5%: domain reputation damage likely, immediate action required
- Above 3%: pause all sending, fix list hygiene before resuming
Pro tip: email providers track bounce rates closely because high bounces are a classic sign of a spammer blasting purchased lists. at high volume, bad data compounds fast. one campaign with a 3% bounce rate can burn domains that took weeks to warm up. verify your entire list through a verification tool before every single send. no exceptions.
When to use this: you suspect your sending domain has been flagged or blacklisted. this is the nuclear option diagnostic for when everything should be working but isn't.
I think my cold email sending domain might have a damaged reputation. Walk me through a complete domain reputation check.
My domain: [YOUR SENDING DOMAIN]
Provider: [GOOGLE WORKSPACE / MICROSOFT 365]
How long I've been sending from it: [DURATION]
Daily volume from this domain: [EMAILS PER DAY]
Recent issues: [DESCRIBE — sudden spam placement, bounces, account warnings, etc.]
Check these areas:
1. Google Postmaster Tools — What should I look for in the domain reputation dashboard?
2. Blacklist check — Which blacklists should I check? (give me the specific URLs and tools)
3. MXToolbox diagnostics — What tests should I run and what do the results mean?
4. Sending history analysis — Based on my volume and duration, is this domain likely burned?
For each check, give me:
- The exact steps to perform the check
- What a healthy result looks like
- What a compromised result looks like
- The fix if it's compromised
If the domain IS compromised, give me:
- Whether to retire it permanently or attempt recovery
- Recovery steps if salvageable (with timeline)
- How to set up replacement domains without making the same mistake
- How many replacement domains I need based on my volume