MailDock: Cold Email Infrastructure

by bernardohcr • 1 year ago

4 14 1 year ago

After years battling Google Workspace for cold outreach — bans, poor deliverability, expensive pricing, painful setup, and scaling issues — we decided to build the infrastructure we always wished existed.

We previously built and scaled TheChecker, an email deliverability SaaS used by Netflix, Mojang (Minecraft), and 6,000+ paying users worldwide. It was later acquired and became Emailable.

Now we’re building MailDock — a fully-managed, plug-and-play mailbox designed specifically for cold emailers.

It replaces Google Workspace seamlessly, with no changes to your existing workflow.

It’s like having a deliverability expert on call 24/7, monitoring, optimizing, and proactively fixing issues — for just $2/mo per mailbox.

We’re still early, but some tests showed very promising results and cost savings.

Would love your feedback, questions, and brutal honesty.

collin128• 1 year ago

What kind of inboxes are they?

What has deliverability been like?

bernardohcr7• 1 year ago

Hey!

These are proprietary mailboxes. Yes, we’ve built an email server from scratch, so we could control and optimize every single layer of it, 100% focused on the inherent challenges of (legit) cold email at scale.

By being truly full-stack, we are able to automate a lot of stuff behind the scenes. I’m referring to things that are important, but very boring, technical, and time-consuming, so nobody actually do.

Example: instead of YOU manually monitoring blacklists and inbox placements in each mailbox, the system does that. If any issue is detected, it temporarily pauses sending from that mailbox and automatically increases warmup until it heals. Another example is rewriting each email to remove spam-trigger keywords and optimize other details (optional). That is done 100% automatically, so you can have way better results with zero maintenance work.

The system also has a dynamic sending queue for each ISP and takes into account the mailbox, domain reputation, and the most updated always-changing ISP rules.

These are only a few of the dozens of tiny optimizations we do, that compound into more sales.

The deliverability has been excellent, literally 100% based on daily inbox placement tests made over a week. We’re still optimizing some details before publish launch. Are you currently doing any cold email campaigns? If you want, it will be a pleasure to have a call and help with anything you need.

m82labs• 1 year ago

I have no use for this but my first thought is wondering how safe the features like InfiniteSpin are from hallucinations. That’s assuming it’s using an LLM of course.

bernardohcr7• 1 year ago

The InfiniteSpin is optional and have a strict and extensive prompt that keeps the original structure, goal, and tone, but rephrases the message WITHOUT changing any important info like numbers, names, data, etc.

We only use latest LLM models. We used Claude 3.7 Sonnet (and are now updating to 4).

guluarte• 1 year ago

AI spam, interesting...

bernardohcr7• 1 year ago

This is aimed only for legit B2B email outreach. We have abuse detection systems in place and monitor it closely. Accepting and following the Anti-spam Policy is mandatory. Let's not burn this ultra-high ROI B2B channel. :)

bananapub• 1 year ago

This is aimed only for legit B2B email outreach.

What does “aimed” mean? That you validate how the company got my email address before you send spam to me on their behalf? Or that you just remembered to put a checkbox asking people to not obviously spam?

1shooner• 1 year ago

This is more of a general market question: what kind of companies convert from cold email these days? My personal inbox simply doesn't receive them, and if I ever receive a cold email in my professional inbox, I immediately report it as spam.

JimDabell2• 1 year ago

My golden rule is: if I didn’t give you my email address and you’re sending bulk commercial email to me, you are a spammer, you immediately get reported as spam, and you get put on my shitlist so even if you reach me some other way, like from an advert or connection, I won’t buy from you.

If you are sending commercial email to me, the absolute bare minimum I need from you to distinguish you from a spammer is to know how you got my email address. This is something that the spammers never provide.

Services like this all seem to be aimed at black hat spammers who buy emails without consent and who I definitely don’t ever want to email me. Note how there are features intended to evade spam filters listed, but absolutely nothing about consent, opt-in, things like that.

The links in the footer: Privacy Policy – dead link; GDPR – dead link; Cookie Policy – dead link.

The reason why these services need to spend so much time talking about deliverability is because people report them as spam, which rightfully harms their deliverability.

bernardohcr7• 1 year ago

I understand and respect your POV.

Nobody likes receiving random stuff, but if it is legitimate beneficial to my business, it's actually good IMHO.

In fact, we will enforce user verification via SMS (no VOIP allowed), exactly to ban spammers and focus on legit, B2B-only cold emailers.

As I mentioned in the comment, we're early and not publicly open. That's why the landing page is not 100% completed yet. A link was mandatory to post here...

bernardohcr7• 1 year ago

That's a super valid question.

Actually, cold email is actually recommended by Y Combinator. They say it "is a necessary tool for helping build your startup"

It is just challenging because of technical aspects and lack of knowledge. We're starting with cold email infrastructure, but we'll evolve into a full-stack platform, including help to find, enrich leads, prepare high-converting sequences, etc. All without the technical BS (and costs) of tools like Clay and similars.

Here is a video that might help: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Kh_fpxP1yY

Here is the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-convert-custome...

MailDock: Cold Email Infrastructure

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