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Malik Hamza Shabbir
AI Automation

Cold Email Infrastructure & Outbound Automation

I build the machine behind outbound: sourcing, one grounded opening line per lead, a mailbox fleet sending at its real ceiling, and replies classified into actions.

Send your project brief Last updated September 21, 2026
In short

Outbound breaks in the plumbing, not the copy. Leads get contacted twice, mailboxes get throttled without anyone noticing, and the inbox fills faster than a person can triage. I build the whole path: sourcing against your ICP, an AI opening line grounded in something true about each prospect, sending through a warmed mailbox fleet at the volume it can actually sustain, and a classifier that turns every reply into the right next action.

What you get

Absolute deduplication enforced in your database, because vendor cross-campaign dedup does not reliably work and I have measured it
One AI opening line per lead, grounded in a verifiable fact and linted before it is allowed to send
Per-mailbox pacing tuned to the provider's real limit, so the fleet sends at its ceiling instead of silently queueing
Reply classifier with an action engine: urgent, draft, referral, domain block, unsubscribe
Optional autonomous multi-turn replies that ship switched off and re-run a full safety gate before every send
Open and click tracking off by default, since the pixel triggers spam filters and renders as a broken image
Suppression lists for prior contacts, current customers and competitor domains, enforced as tests
Deliverability alerting so a dead verification balance or a paused campaign surfaces in minutes, not weeks

How I work

  1. 01

    ICP and firewall

    We define exactly who is a prospect and, just as importantly, who is not. I build the exclusion rules as tests, so competitors, existing customers and anyone previously contacted can never enter a campaign.

  2. 02

    Sourcing and verification

    Leads come from Apollo or a cheaper registry-first waterfall where one exists, get email-verified, and land in your database with a normalised unique key so the same person cannot be sourced twice.

  3. 03

    Personalisation that is grounded

    Each opening line is generated from something verifiable about the prospect and then checked by a linter that rejects hallucinations, including the failure where a generated line names the prospect's own product as their competitor.

  4. 04

    Send, classify, act

    Sending runs through your mailbox fleet at its true ceiling with follow-ups on a cadence. Replies are classified and routed to Slack, to a draft, to a blocklist or to a human, depending on what they are.

Ways to work together

Outbound engine build

Sourcing, enrichment, verification, AI personalisation, sending and follow-ups as one pipeline you own, with a dashboard instead of eight browser tabs.

Deliverability and fleet engineering

Mailbox provisioning, warmup, per-mailbox pacing, tracking-pixel and spam-trigger removal, and the monitoring that tells you the day a provider starts throttling you.

AI reply classification and auto-reply

Every reply sorted into interested, objection, referral, wrong person or unsubscribe, each with an action. Optional multi-turn auto-reply, shipped off by default and gated before every send.

Dedup and suppression you can trust

Database-level uniqueness, domain blocklists and prior-contact suppression, verified by measurement rather than by trusting a vendor's own dedup.

Tech I use for this

Apollo APISmartlead APIOpenAINode.jsExpressMySQLRedisNext.jsSlack APIMillionVerifiernode-cronDockerGitHub Actions

Common questions

Q.How much does an outbound engine cost to build?

A working pipeline with sourcing, personalisation, sending and Slack notifications starts around $8k. The full system with reply classification, an action engine and a dashboard usually runs $18k to $30k. Hourly work after launch is $150 to $250.

Q.Why build this instead of just using Smartlead or Instantly?

Use them for sending, they are good at it. What they do not give you is a lead database you own, deduplication you can prove, personalisation grounded in your own research, and reply handling wired into your process. I build that layer and let the sending tool do what it is for.

Q.Is cold email legal where my prospects are?

It depends on the jurisdiction, and the rules for B2B in the EU, UK and US differ meaningfully. I build the consent, suppression and unsubscribe handling the system needs, and I will tell you plainly where a targeting idea is a problem, but the legal call on your market is yours to take with your own advisor.

Q.How many emails a day can it actually send?

The honest number is mailboxes times the per-mailbox daily limit, minus warmup. Thirty mailboxes at twenty-five sends a day is 750, and that includes follow-ups. Anyone quoting far more than that is either counting queued mail as sent or is about to burn your domains.

Q.Can it handle replies without me reading them?

Classification, yes, reliably. Autonomous replying is possible and I have built it, but it ships switched off with a safety gate that re-runs before every send. I recommend starting with drafts you approve and only then loosening it.

Q.Do you run campaigns, or only build the system?

I build and maintain the system. I am an engineer, not an SDR agency. If you need someone writing the campaigns day to day, keep that in-house or with your agency and I will make sure the machine serves them.

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Start your project

Tell me what you are building and I will reply within one business day with next steps. You talk to me, the person writing the code, the whole way through.