Why I built a tool that tells you what's wrong with your cold email

I sent countless cold emails over the last decade, mostly in sensitive areas, and the results were mixed. If I finally managed to compose a text that wasn't too much of everything, it was caught by filters. If it snuck past filters, it was ignored because it was just like the 200 others they received in the same day.

People receive countless emails a day, and they develop a sort of "email blindness" - they don't even notice dime-a-dozen messages. That's where Cold Email Critic comes in.

What's a cold email critic? Well, it's a tool that tells you the things you didn't want to hear about your cold email - where it fails, where it's generic, and where it's spammy. It won't tell you whether your email makes it past the filters. But by being brutally honest, it will help you improve, maybe reach more people.

What you put in, and what you get back

You paste the subject line and the body, then pick the context: a first cold email, a follow-up or a newsletter. Newsletters get looser rules. There's no word limit, more than one call to action is fine, and the opener isn't judged on formality.

For cold emails and follow-ups you also pick the email type: sales, link building and outreach, recruitment, or affiliate and partnership. Then the industry. There are ten, plus General if yours isn't on the list.

What comes back is a score out of 100 and a grade. Strong sits at the top, Poor at the bottom. The full label for that one is "Poor - rewrite recommended", which is about as polite as the tool gets.

Under the score you get the list of issues, section by section, so you can see where the points went. There's a PDF version of the report too.

Nothing you paste is stored. The tool reads the email, scores it and forgets it.

Five sections, 20 points each

The subject line is checked for length, word count, spam trigger words and all caps. It also catches the fake bold letters people copy from Unicode generators. Vague subjects lose points as well.

The opener check looks for merge tags nobody filled in, the kind that turns "Hi {First Name}" into the first thing the recipient reads. It also catches the openers everyone uses, "I hope this email finds you well" and "My name is" among them. If your first line shows you actually looked at the person you're writing to, you get credit for it.

The value section checks length. A first cold email over 200 words gets flagged. It also compares how often you talk about yourself with how often you talk about the reader, and how hard the text is to read.

The call to action section wants one clear ask. Asking a stranger for a 15-minute call or a demo in the first email counts against you. Which makes sense: you wouldn't say yes to one either. Stacking several questions at the end costs points too. So does a missing sign-off, while a P.S. earns a small bonus.

The last section is industry and email type flags. These are phrases so common in a niche that they mark your email as one of the 200 before the recipient gets to the second line. Link building outreach has the longest list, by far.

Tested on real inboxes

I didn't want rules copied from other people's blog posts. So I tested the scoring against emails from my own inboxes: 1,089 spam and junk outreach messages, and 55 genuine business pitches.

After several rounds of tuning, 54 of the 55 genuine emails score 55 or higher. About 15% of the spam still scores 70 or more. I think that's the honest result. A spammer can write a clean email, and the tool grades the writing. It can't read the sender's mind.

What it won't do

As I said, it won't tell you whether your email lands in the inbox. That depends on your domain setup, your sending volume and a few other things the tool never sees.

It won't judge your offer either. A well-written email about something the reader doesn't need still gets ignored.

And it won't rewrite the email for you. Not yet, anyway.

Score before you send.