CellCog Cold Outreach Guide
Your AI employees run cold email outreach end to end: they source and enrich leads, write one personal email at a time, send from dedicated pre-warmed mailboxes inside enforced guardrails, and work the replies in their own inbox, while you follow everything on the Cold Outreach page.
What Cold Outreach Is
Cold outreach is a capability of AI employees (see the AI Employees Guide). You hire an employee for a sales or outreach role, describe who you sell to and why they should care, and the employee runs the pipeline:
- Builds a lead pool from your connected Apollo account or from lists you import
- Enriches and verifies addresses, then researches the people worth writing to
- Writes each email individually, one lead at a time, with a reason for reaching out that is true for that person
- Sends within guardrails from dedicated sending domains, paced like a careful human
- Works the replies in its inbox and brings you the conversations that need your judgment
There is no campaign builder and no blast. The unit of work is one personal email to one well-fit person.
You stay in control through standing approvals (what the employee may do without asking, agreed in chat) plus guardrails the platform enforces on every send. Per-send sign-off is not part of the model.
Sending Domains: Bought Per Account, Shared by Your Employees
Cold mail is never sent from your company domain, and never from an employee's own @cellcog.com address. It goes out from dedicated sending domains with pre-warmed mailboxes:
- You pick from pre-warmed inventory. When your account has no ready domain, the employee shows you available domains with their cost in credits. You choose one in chat; that choice is the go-ahead. Provisioning is a recurring cost: a monthly cost per mailbox plus a yearly domain renewal, both shown on the Cold Outreach page.
- Ready means the domain's mailboxes are warmed and can send now.
- Account-owned, shared by all your employees. A domain bought for one employee is available to every employee on your account, so a new hire usually starts on a domain you already have.
- Never shared across accounts. A sending domain's reputation is yours alone.
- Release what you no longer need from the Fleet tab. A domain keeps billing until you release it.
Your Own Mailbox (Light Outreach, Optional)
Best for people who already know you: existing customers, inbound contacts, partners and opt-ins. Strangers and purchased lists always go through dedicated sending domains, so a complaint never touches your primary domain.
If your account has this option, the Cold Outreach page offers a third setup step: connect your own Google Workspace mailbox and let your employees send a small amount of cold email from your real address. It is deliberately small. Cold email from your primary domain carries your company's reputation, and a send-only connection gives us no way to see spam complaints on it, so the limits are set where a single complaint would not cross Google's line:
- 10 first touches per day (3 a day during the first week after you connect), 150 cold sends per 30 days, verified addresses only, and never to lists you bought.
- One mailbox, shared by all your employees, no extra cost.
- We send on your behalf and never read your inbox. Replies reach your employee because it is listed in the reply address; you can switch employee replies off and answer yourself.
- The platform pauses sending on the signals it can see (Google rate limits, rejected addresses, unsubscribes, stop requests, addresses that fail re-verification). You resume from the Fleet tab. Two pauses in 60 days retire the route until you reconnect.
- Consumer Gmail addresses can be connected but never send cold email.
Google may show an unverified-app notice on the consent screen while our app's verification completes. For volume, use dedicated sending domains below.
Mailboxes: Each Employee Claims Its Own
Mailboxes on a domain are claimed, not shared:
- An employee's first cold send on a domain claims one mailbox for it. The mailbox takes the employee's name ("<Name> AI") and its address carries the employee's handle.
- An employee can claim several mailboxes on one domain for more capacity. Its sends spread across its own mailboxes automatically; you and the employee only ever choose the domain.
- A mailbox claimed by one employee is never used by another. If a domain has no free mailbox, the employee uses another domain or asks you for more capacity.
- Cold mail is honestly disclosed as coming from an AI employee, in the From line and in the footer. Invented personas are not allowed.
The Fleet tab shows each domain, its mailboxes and who claimed them, and each mailbox's Sign-in details if you ever need to open it in a browser (Fix login appears when a login needs repair).
Before the First Cold Send
One thing must be in place, and the Cold Outreach page shows it:
- Your sender identity. Anti-spam law (CAN-SPAM) requires your name and postal address on every cold email. Enter them in your settings (the Cold Outreach page shows Add your details until they exist, then Edit). Every cold send, and every sending-domain purchase, is blocked until this is set.
One thing is optional:
- Your Apollo account. Connect it if you want your employee to source new prospects and reveal their emails (Connect Apollo on the page). Reveals spend your Apollo credits, not CellCog credits, which is one more reason sharp targeting matters. Apollo is not needed to buy a sending domain or to email contacts you import from your own CRM or spreadsheets; an import-based outreach lane runs without it. See the Connectors & Tools Guide.
Leads
- Sourcing. The employee searches Apollo by titles, seniority, keywords, company size and location, and saves the results into named lists. Sourcing does not reveal emails, so a large pending pool costs little. Re-running the same search adds only new people.
- Importing. You can give the employee your own contacts (CRM exports, spreadsheets, contacts it researched for you). Each import records how you are entitled to contact those people (an existing customer, someone who contacted you first, a partner, an opt-in, a cold prospect, or a purchased list; your employee will ask you which), is checked against your do-not-contact list, and has every address verified as deliverable when it is stored (a fresh check runs only for addresses not verified in the last 60 days, covered by CellCog). Invalid addresses are marked and never emailed. The Leads tab shows each lead's source and verification.
- Enrichment and research. After pruning the obvious misses, the employee reveals and verifies emails in bulk, then researches only the people who can actually be emailed. The research is saved on the lead, so a teammate or a later shift never repeats it.
- Verification at send. Only verified addresses are emailed. A stale address is re-checked automatically before sending, and a reveal that returns the wrong company is blocked until the employee confirms the person's identity.
- Skips. A lead the employee decides not to email is marked Not a fit (which also sets do-not-contact for your organization) or Unidentifiable. Both can be restored to pending.
- Transfers. A pending lead can be transferred to another of your employees with a note; the research and history move with it, and the receiving employee gets a task explaining why.
- One lead database per organization. All your employees draw from the same database, and each lead has exactly one owning employee (the Assigned to column). A person already held by one employee is never re-added under another.
Lead statuses on the page: Pending, Queued, Contacted, Replied, Completed, Bounced, Unsubscribed, Not a fit, Unidentifiable.
The Test Lead
Ask your employee to send you a test. It creates a test lead whose address is your own email, then sends to it exactly like a real lead: from its claimed mailbox, through the queue and the guardrails, into the same threading. Reply to it and the employee's reply comes back from the same mailbox. Test sends are free (no reveal), never count in your metrics, and can be repeated any time. Run one after provisioning, before the first real send.
Sending: The Queue and Pacing
Cold sends do not leave the moment the employee writes them. They enter a paced send queue that releases them the way a careful human would:
- Business hours in your timezone: 9:00 to 18:00, seven days a week. Emails written outside the window wait for it to open.
- Natural spacing of a few minutes between sends from the same mailbox.
- Daily caps of about 20 emails per mailbox and 60 per domain in any rolling 24 hours. Capacity comes from more claimed mailboxes and more domains, never from pushing one mailbox harder.
- Replies come first. A reply to someone who has already engaged is released promptly at any hour. Follow-ups release ahead of new first touches.
- At most three touches per lead. A reply from the lead stops the follow-ups. Follow-ups keep the original subject and thread, from the same mailbox.
- Honest subjects are enforced. A first touch can never start with "Re:" or "Fwd:".
A queued lead shows as Queued on the Leads tab until its email goes out.
Placement Checks: Automated Evidence, Your Decision
The platform watches each domain's engagement. When a domain with a meaningful send history looks unhealthy (replies below 2%, bounces above 2%, or spam complaints), it runs an automatic placement check: real test emails from the domain's own mailboxes to seed inboxes at the major providers, checking which folder each one lands in. While the check runs, new first touches hold; follow-ups and replies continue.
- Everything lands in the inbox: the domain resumes on its own. You never notice a healthy domain being checked.
- Anything less: first touches stay held and you receive the full Placement report (overall score, per-provider scores, per-mailbox breakdown). You decide whether to resume the domain or mark it spam-compromised. There is no automatic failure, because placement often splits by provider and only you know where your buyers read their mail.
- If you do not decide within two days, the decision lands on the owning employee's task board with the evidence attached. It decides based on your audience and records its reasoning on the report.
You can also start a check yourself with Run placement check on the Fleet tab.
Burned Domains
When a provider starts sending a domain's mail to spam, mark it spam-compromised on the Fleet tab (there is an optional note for how you detected it). Your employees can also do this, but only on your explicit instruction. Marking a domain spam-compromised:
- Stops all cold sends from it, first touches and follow-ups alike
- Retires its in-sequence leads (contacted, never replied) so their follow-ups do not land in spam; their research is kept for a deliberate restore after a cooldown
- Keeps engaged conversations alive: replies to people who already answered still go out, so the employee can close or move the conversation elsewhere
- Keeps billing until you release the domain
The replacement flow is a new domain (you pick it), a new claimed mailbox, and new leads. Re-emailing the retired list from a fresh domain right away is exactly what burns the next domain, so the employee will not do it.
Guardrails You Cannot Override
Every cold send passes checks enforced by the platform, not left to the employee's judgment:
- Suppression. An unsubscribe permanently blocks that address for your whole account; no employee of yours can email it again. An address that bounced or filed a spam complaint anywhere on CellCog is blocked for every sender.
- Frequency caps. No recipient gets more than one email in 24 hours or more than three in 30 days, across all CellCog employees.
- Region compliance. Leads in the EU and Canada are excluded by default.
- Sender identity and honest subjects, as above.
A blocked send is normal, not an error: the employee moves to another lead or waits for a cap to clear.
Replies and the Inbox
Replies land back in the same thread in the employee's inbox and wake the employee. It answers from the cold mailbox the conversation started on, so the lead keeps talking to the same person at the same address. Conversations that need your judgment are flagged to you instead of guessed at. The Replies tab on the Cold Outreach page shows every reply thread across your employees.
The Cold Outreach Page
The Cold Outreach page (/outreach) is your window into the operation:
- Summary: Leads pending, Emailed, Replied, Bounce rate, Mailboxes ready, Monthly cost, Yearly domain cost
- Activity: People contacted, Replies, Bounces and Unsubscribes for Today, Last 7 days or Last 30 days, with a lead pipeline breakdown
- Leads tab: every lead in your organization's database with status, source, verification, owning employee and saved research; search by name, company or email; filter by status and by source. A Where your leads come from block shows, per source, how many addresses are verified and how many replied, the verdicts across your database, how many imported addresses were verified when stored, and how many of those checks the shared registry answered for free. Add leads lets you add one contact or upload a CSV yourself, choosing the employee who will work them and how you are entitled to contact them; your rows go through the same checks as an employee import
- Replies tab: reply threads and their status
- Fleet tab: domains and mailboxes, health, sign-in details, placement checks, spam-compromised marking, and release controls
- Setup cards for Apollo and your sender identity
Your employee's own activity report reads the same numbers, so what it tells you in chat and what the page shows always agree.
Costs
- Sending infrastructure: a monthly cost per mailbox and a yearly cost per domain, in credits, shown on the page before you pick a domain and on the Fleet tab afterwards. Billing continues until you release.
- Reveals: your Apollo credits, spent only on people the employee actually emails or enriches.
- The employee's time: normal shift work, spending credits as it goes; the cost depends purely on how much work you assign and which tier runs it (typical figures: the Billing Guide, under What Work Costs).
- Test sends: free.
Getting Started
- Hire an AI employee for an outreach role and describe your offer and ideal customer in the first shift
- Add your sender identity (required), and connect Apollo only if your employee should source new prospects; importing your own contacts needs no Apollo (the Cold Outreach page shows both)
- Pick a sending domain from the options your employee presents, or point it at one your account already has
- Ask for a test send to your own inbox and reply to it
- Agree the standing approvals (for example, first touches to leads it has researched, up to the platform caps) and give it a routine for its sending window; see the Routines Guide
- Watch the Cold Outreach page; the employee flags replies that need you
Tip: enable Auto-Recharge so an outreach employee never stalls on balance mid-sequence.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I add my own contacts without asking an employee?
Yes. On the Leads tab, Add leads takes one contact or a CSV file (columns such as email, first name, last name, company, title, phone, notes). You pick the employee who will work them and declare how you are entitled to contact them (existing customers, people who contacted you, partners, opt-ins, cold prospects, or a purchased list). Every address is checked against your do-not-contact list and verified as deliverable when it is stored, exactly like an employee import. Contacts from a purchased list can travel only on a dedicated sending domain, never on your own mailbox.
Will this hurt my company domain's reputation?
No. Outreach is sent only from dedicated sending domains bought for this purpose, never from your primary domain and never from the employee's @cellcog.com address.
Does my employee need my approval for every send?
No. You approve the recurring costs (by picking a domain), set your sender identity, and agree standing approvals in chat. Every send then passes the platform's guardrails, which neither you nor the employee can switch off.
Why was a send blocked?
The most common reasons: sender identity not set, the recipient is suppressed, a daily cap or the sending window, a placement hold on the domain, or a fourth touch to the same person. The employee sees the reason and moves on. An unconnected Apollo account never blocks a send or a domain purchase; it only stops the employee from sourcing new prospects.
Why did new emails stop going out?
Usually a placement check. Open the Placement report on the Fleet tab and decide: resume or mark spam-compromised.
What happens when someone unsubscribes?
They are suppressed for your whole account immediately and permanently, for every one of your employees.
Can several employees share the same domain?
Yes. Domains belong to your account; each employee claims its own mailboxes on them. Caps apply per mailbox and per domain regardless of who sends.
Can I move leads from one employee to another?
Yes. Ask the owning employee to transfer them (pending leads only; a contacted lead's conversation stays with the mailbox it started on).
Can I see the leads?
Yes. The Leads tab lists every lead in your organization's database with its status, owning employee and saved research.
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