Latest technology in cold bulk emailing

note/tldr : I have no clue how they pulled it off, it’s just my analysis and thoughts on the final prouduct

Today I was checking my inbox and I saw an email from another @gmail.com and I thought must have got an email from the few people that stumble across this website… and I opened it and it was a advertisment type cold email… Normally it should go to spam, Zoho’s spam filters are good enough… HOWEVER, in this case, I read the email and it was a bit personalized for some reason? Like it felt as if it wasn’t a cold email but rather someone who saw me as a good tester for their application… something like a closed invite-only thing.

So first thing I checked were the email headers to see if the email was automated by any means and there we go:

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Received
from vps-XXXXXXX (vps-XXXXXXX.vps.ovh.ca. [XXXXXXX::1]) by smtp.gmail.com with ESMTPSA id
XXXXXXXXXXXXX.XXXXX.XXXX.XXXX.XXXX for <[email protected]>
(version=TLS1_3 cipher=TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 bits=256/256); Fri, 31 Jul 2026 22:04:27 -0700 (PDT)

ANDDDDD its an automated mail… probably. Unless someone is genuinly living like some monk to forward email from specalized setup routing via the ovh vps over gmail smtp… idk why you would even do that, it’s 99% an automated mail…

Look I will be honest, I have no clue how they did the personalisation part…

I will show you guys the entire email:

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Hi Ritabrata,

I’m XXXX, a solo founder building XXXX. I wanted an alternative to XXXX for ABCD reasons.

Your hands-on work with systems, graphics engineering, Linux, and open-source projects
makes you exactly the kind of independent developer whose honest product feedback would
help. XXXX is Android-only, 100% free, and has no ads:
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=XXXX

If you have a moment to try it, I’d genuinely appreciate your thoughts. Thanks, XXXX.

If you would rather not receive messages like this, just say so and I will not follow up. 

This email doesn’t sound like Generative AI at all, or even AI-Assisted by any means… Plus it would be really expensive to call a LLM to generate an unique email for each cold email xd… like imagine mailing 100k random developers. If you focus on the personalization part, “Your hands-on work with systems, graphics engineering, Linux, and open-source projects makes you exactly the kind…” Even if they used some sort of generative AI… the sentence doesn’t flow well… if you know what I mean… it feels written by an algorithm… some sort of mad libs… My guess is that they scrapped my github repo and used some pattern matching machine learning thingy to extract keywords and they just put it into the Mad Libs function… Either ways GitHub should start restricting the email through its API man, its so annoying, every third day I get an email from the most random people asking to try project — There’s nothing wrong with it, but atleast consider typing out the email yourself… instead of just sending me an email from a bulk email sender… If you want me to try your project, please feel free to reach out, although I prefer Discord to email, you can ask me, and I will try my best to reply.

Either ways… whoever came up with this genius pipeline to slip past the spam filters of both human beings and computers has won, because it ended up in my priority inbox and I ended up reading the entire email lol. Just because you wrote an email spammer in lisp doesn’t make the email any less annoying… smh smh. (hypothetical, I don’t know if they actually did write that in lisp lol)