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Cold Email Blocker keeps unsolicited sales pitches and outreach out of your inbox before you ever see them. The AI recognizes cold emails that traditional spam filters miss, while anyone who has emailed you before always gets through. Open the account menu at the bottom of the left sidebar and select Cold Email Blocker, or visit Cold Email Blocker. The menu item appears for Google accounts. On Outlook, manage cold email through the Cold Email rule in the Assistant, described below.

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Choose What Happens to Cold Emails

Cold email handling is controlled by the Cold Email rule in the Assistant. To change it, open the Settings tab on the Cold Email Blocker page and click Go to Assistant Rules, then edit the Cold Email rule. By default, the rule’s actions are:
  • Gmail: Label cold emails Cold Email, archive them, and notify the sender.
  • Outlook: Move cold emails to a Cold Email folder.
Change or remove these actions to adjust what happens. For example, remove the archive action to keep cold emails in your inbox with a label. The rule’s prompt decides what counts as a cold email. The default works for most people, but you can edit it in the rule. Giving examples of what you do and don’t consider a cold email works well. Cold email detection applies only to new emails as they arrive; it does not reprocess older mail.

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Notify Sender

The Notify sender action emails the cold sender to let them know their email was filtered and suggests they try another way to reach you. To stop these emails, remove the Notify sender action from the rule. On self-hosted instances, the action is only added when outgoing email is configured.

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Review Cold Emails

The Cold Emails tab lists the emails that were detected as cold. If a sender was flagged by mistake, click Not cold email on the row, or select several rows and click Mark Not Cold Email. Inbox Zero stops flagging that sender as cold. If your Cold Email rule applies a label (the default on Gmail), Inbox Zero also removes it from up to 500 of that sender’s conversations, including archived ones. Emails stay where they are: archived emails stay archived, and on Outlook, emails stay in the Cold Email folder. Move them back yourself if you want them in your inbox. Senders you’ve rejected appear on the Marked Not Cold tab.

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Testing

Open the Test tab to paste in an email or test against previous emails to see if they would be marked as cold.