Cold Email Infrastructure for Outbound Outside Italy

We do not build cold outbound aimed at recipients in Italy. Art. 130 of the Codice Privacy treats unsolicited commercial email as opt-in and gives no corporate-subscriber carve-out of the kind the UK and Ireland allow, so an Italian cold programme is a regulatory position we will not help you take. This engagement builds sending estates pointed at the United States, the United Kingdom, DACH and the Nordics, and it stops at the Italian border. If Italian outbound is the plan, we are the wrong practice and this is the shortest way to find that out. The estate: Separate sending domains, never the corporate root and never a domain that also carries the newsletter — one burned outbound domain should not take your invoicing mail with it. We choose the registrar and DNS host, register the domains, and let them age 21 to 30 days before the first message leaves. Domains bought on Monday and sending on Tuesday are a signal in themselves. Mailboxes and volume: Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 or dedicated SMTP, each with a different failure mode and a different cost curve at your target volume, chosen against your reply-handling process rather than against a blog post. Per-inbox ceiling of 20 to 30 sends a day, not the 50 the sequencing tools default to. That figure is not conservatism — it is where reply rate stops falling in the accounts we have run, and it means the estate is sized by the number of conversations your team can actually hold, not by a monthly send target. Authentication per domain: SPF listing only the sending source. DKIM on the sending platform. DMARC at p=none with RUA pointing at a mailbox somebody reads, for the first 60 days, then quarantine. A custom tracking domain per sending domain, CNAME'd and never shared across the estate, because a shared tracking host means one client's reputation lands on another's links. Tracking, deliberately reduced: Open tracking off. It adds a remote image to a message that should read as plain text from one person to another, and Apple Mail Privacy Protection has made the resulting number meaningless since 2021. Link tracking only where a sequence genuinely branches on it. Most sequences do not. What we refuse: Automated warm-up pools and reciprocal mailbox networks — the traffic pattern is machine-detectable and you are trading reputation with strangers. Inbox counts inflated to outrun provider limits. Scraped or purchased lists. Pattern-guessed addresses. HCP outreach for pharma clients without documented regulatory sign-off. And any request to point the finished estate at Italian recipients after handover, which we will treat as the end of the engagement. GDPR, for EU recipients: A legitimate interest assessment on file before the first send, Art. 14 notice text inside the first message, and suppression that applies estate-wide on the first request rather than per domain. Objection handling is designed into the sequencer, not bolted on after the first complaint. What is handed over: Zone files, provisioned mailboxes, sequencer configuration in Smartlead, Instantly or lemlist, the suppression architecture, the ramp schedule, and a runbook covering what to do when a domain burns — because one eventually will, and the difference between a bad week and a bad quarter is whether the replacement path was written down in advance. Not included: Sequence copy. List sourcing, which is separate work. Campaign management. SDR hiring or training. Who this is not for: Anyone whose plan is volume. The estate is sized to conversations you can hold.