Keep Your Chain

Blog

On outreach, and the chain.

Practical writing on cold email: what lands, what gets filtered, and why the thread — or chain, depending on who you ask — is the whole game.

Sep 13, 2026

Cold email compliance checklist: CAN-SPAM, GDPR and CASL in plain English

What the law actually requires of a B2B cold email in the US, EU/UK and Canada: postal address, honest headers and subject lines, a working opt-out honoured within 10 days, a legitimate-interest basis, and the records to keep. Checklist included.

Sep 12, 2026

Email warmup, explained: what actually warms, what doesn't, and how long it takes

Warmup is two different things people call by one name: a slow ramp of real sends, and a network of seed inboxes exchanging friendly mail. What each does for reputation, how long a new domain really needs, and when to stop.

Sep 12, 2026

Keep Your Chain vs. Instantly, Smartlead and Lemlist: what's actually different

A fair comparison. The volume tools win on scale, mailbox count and built-in warmup pools. Keep Your Chain is built for a founder selling their own product: one chain per company, stop on any reply or install, a 30-a-day ceiling, no tracking.

Sep 11, 2026

Cold email domain setup checklist: the six DNS records and the one redirect

Exactly what a sending domain needs before the first cold email: MX, SPF, two DKIM CNAMEs, DMARC at p=quarantine, autodiscover, and a redirect to your real site. Copy-paste values for Microsoft 365, plus the mistakes that fail silently.

Sep 11, 2026

How many cold emails can you send per day? The honest math for 2026

Per mailbox, per domain, and per person: the daily numbers that keep cold email in the inbox, why 30 a day per mailbox is the ceiling, and how to get to 180 a day without burning a domain.

Sep 10, 2026

Why your cold email follow-up should be a reply, not a new email

Sending follow-ups in the same email thread (or chain) changes what the recipient sees, what the spam filter sees, and how replies get matched. Here is why, and the three headers that make it work.

Sep 9, 2026

Email thread vs. email chain: what the words mean and what holds one together

Email thread and email chain describe the same thing — a series of messages a mail client groups as one conversation. Here is what actually keeps a chain together, why threads break, and how to keep yours intact.

Sep 8, 2026

A cold email that landed in my primary inbox three times: a header-by-header teardown

A three-step cold sequence from an agency hit a Microsoft 365 primary inbox every time. Here is what the headers show about authentication, threading, links and cadence — and the two things the sender got wrong.

Sep 7, 2026

Cold email deliverability in 2026: domains, warmup, and the links question

A practical guide to cold email deliverability: why you never send from your real domain, how long warmup takes, what tracking pixels and link rewriting cost you, and where a link is actually fine.

Sep 6, 2026

Stop sending when they reply — including when someone else replies

Every sequencer stops on reply. Few handle the cases that actually happen: a colleague replies from a different address, an out-of-office with a return date, a referral, or a prospect who signs up without answering. Here is how each should be handled.