I don’t claim to be an expert on email deliverability and spam. But I know a tiny bit. We send well over 1,000,000 emails a week in our SaaStr newsletter. And when I used to run Adobe Sign / EchoSign, I spent a huge amount of time worrying about deliverability. E-signatures, after all, are primarily an e-mail driven exchange. Even the tiniest issues in deliverability, we would hear about it — fast.
And I wonder, and am worried, about the AI SDR. Because I don’t about you, but I am fine Blocking them. And even sometimes, Reporting to Spam. And I’d almost never do that to a human being.
I don’t claim to be a social media expert, either. But again, we have over 1,000,000 social media followers. And one thing is clear — folks are reluctant to “Block” a human. It crosses lines. It creates ill-will, and folks lash out. And notice. Folks really notice when they are blocked.
But the AI?
It’s not even a person. They don’t care.
And even more so, I almost never actually asked for an AI SDR email. Most of them seem to be me being dumped into a list I didn’t ask to join.
So if I didn’t even ask for an AI SDR email? The easiest thing to do is Block.
Today, I block multiple AI SDR emails a week. Before 2025? I don’t think I ever blocked a human-driven SDR. Even if it was a cadence, at least I could see it was from a human. I’d ignore it, but block seemed … aggro. Too much. But now, I block ’em all.
We’ll see how this all gets resolved.
At a minimum, there’s no way I would send AI SDR emails from my own domain.
A related post here:
