Don’t Use Resend for Cold Email.

I came here to find people.

LinkedIn increasingly feels like a trade fair where everybody has brought a microphone.

Someone has discovered the future of work. Someone else has reinvented sales. A third person has a framework that will apparently change my life, provided I leave the correct word beneath their post.

Somewhere in the middle of this, I am trying to find a person with whom I might actually do business.

I still find useful people there. That is what makes the irritation harder to dismiss. If the place were completely useless, leaving would be easy. Instead, useful conversations share a room with a considerable amount of theatre.

I wrote about that recently in What Is LinkedIn For Anymore? I’m Starting to Forget. This is the practical question that follows it.

If you run a small business, where do you go to find customers without turning customer acquisition into another full-time job?

You can publish more. Buy a subscription. Send messages. Learn another platform. Add another tool.

Eventually, the monthly subscriptions start looking more organised than the business they are supposed to help.

Paying for access is the easy part.

I understand why people pay for LinkedIn.

Finding the right person has value. Knowing where someone works, what they do and whether their company fits your offer can save time. A useful introduction can be worth considerably more than the subscription that helped you find it.

But I am less interested in the list of features than in what happens afterwards.

Did a relevant conversation begin? Did the person have the problem you thought they had? Did anything move beyond another politely ignored message?

A Premium badge cannot answer those questions.

There is also a distinction worth keeping clear: LinkedIn Premium and Sales Navigator are different purchases. The latter is LinkedIn’s dedicated sales-prospecting product. At the time of writing, Sales Navigator Core starts at US$119.99 per month, while Instantly’s Growth outreach plan lists US$47 per month on monthly billing. Those are starting software prices, not equivalent packages or a complete outbound budget. LinkedIn pricing, Instantly pricing.

One helps you research people and companies within LinkedIn. The other gives you infrastructure for an email-outreach workflow.

A lower price might make the second route worth considering. It does not tell you which route your customers will welcome.

Still, for someone paying their own bills, that is a reasonable question to ask before renewing another subscription.

Then somebody suggests an email API.

I can see how a builder arrives here.

You already have a website. You know how to connect an API. You can generate a message, put an address beside it and make a system send it.

Resend looks elegant. The developer experience is appealing. Why assemble another sales tool when you could build the workflow yourself?

Because the ability to send an email is only one part of the job.

A password reset has a particular relationship behind it. Someone tried to access an account. A receipt follows a purchase. A subscriber expects the newsletter they requested.

A stranger receiving your sales pitch has a different relationship with you.

The same inbox receives all of these messages. That does not make them interchangeable.

Resend’s position is explicit: its acceptable-use policy prohibits unsolicited messages, including cold outreach, purchased lists and scraped contact data.

So the title is quite literal.

Don’t use Resend for cold email.

I like a product that knows what it is prepared to support. There is nothing insulting about respecting that boundary. If anything, using a good product properly seems a better compliment than trying to force it into a job its provider expressly prohibits.

I have laid out those different email relationships in the FreeMalta cold-email strategy guide. The decision starts before the software.

What are you sending, to whom, and on what basis?

Getting into the inbox is not getting a customer.

Deliverability deserves attention because a message nobody receives has very little chance of beginning a conversation.

But there is a temptation to treat it as the final obstacle.

Authenticate the domain. Warm the mailbox. Get a reassuring score. Launch the sequence. Wait for the calendar to fill.

The person at the other end remains inconveniently absent from that plan.

Google’s sender guidelines emphasise authentication, consistent sending practices and recipient complaints. These are operational responsibilities, not decorative settings to tick once and forget.

And Instantly’s own documentation makes a useful distinction: its warmup health score measures the placement of warmup messages. It does not measure the placement of your actual campaigns.

A healthy warmup score therefore cannot tell you that your offer reached every prospect’s inbox. It certainly cannot tell you that anyone wanted it.

I would rather see an honest account of those limits than another promise about guaranteed meetings.

Good infrastructure gives a relevant message a better opportunity. The relevance still needs to come from somewhere.

What would make me reply?

A small business owner does not need another stranger to announce that they are passionate about helping businesses grow.

They need a reason to believe this particular message belongs in their day.

Imagine a recruiter approaching a company with a clearly advertised hiring need. Or a specialist contacting a business about a specific problem they can demonstrate and genuinely help resolve. Those are hypothetical examples, but the distinction is practical: the message has something to stand on beyond the sender’s desire to sell.

Even then, you need to establish whether the contact is permitted.

Living and building in Malta makes that especially relevant to me. The IDPC’s direct-marketing guidance says electronic marketing generally requires prior consent, with a limited exception involving an earlier customer relationship and similar products or services. Rules differ across jurisdictions; a publicly visible work address is not a universal permission slip.

Buying software does not remove that responsibility.

Once there is a lawful route to contact someone, I would begin with a narrow audience and a message I could defend. I would want to know why that person, why this offer and why now.

Then I would watch what came back.

Questions. Objections. Genuine interest. Requests to stop. Silence.

Those responses tell you more about the business than a dashboard celebrating how many messages left the building.

Choose the part you actually need.

This is where Instantly becomes relevant to the conversation.

If you have an appropriate audience and need a system for running email outreach, it is worth examining. I have put the broader workflow in the AI sales-agent guide, and you can explore Instantly here.

But I would resist buying an entire stack before identifying the problem.

If you already know whom you want to contact, your decision may be about the sending workflow. That is the question behind lemlist versus Instantly.

If the difficulty is finding suitable people in the first place, Instantly versus Apollo is a different conversation. Sending and prospect research should not quietly become the same purchasing decision.

For a team considering a broader sales system, there is also Instantly versus Amplemarket. The useful question is how much of the workflow you actually need to bring together.

And if the people on your list have already asked to hear from you, pause before buying an outbound tool at all. Instantly versus Brevo brings us back to the relationship behind the email: prospecting and communicating with subscribers are different jobs.

You do not need to own every tool in the comparison.

You need to recognise your bottleneck.

I don’t want to build everything.

I enjoy building systems. FreeMalta, News Beast and Gambity should make that fairly obvious.

That enjoyment does not create an obligation to rebuild every service I encounter.

Sometimes an existing product does the job, the subscription is reasonable and somebody else maintains the infrastructure. I am perfectly happy with that arrangement.

Building your own outreach system also means owning the things that happen after the demonstration works. Replies need somewhere to go. Opt-outs need to be respected. Errors need investigating. A sequence needs to stop when continuing would be inappropriate.

The first successful API call is a very small part of that responsibility.

I would rather spend my attention on the audience, the offer and the conversation than create another piece of software merely because I can.

Resend can remain excellent at the work it supports. LinkedIn can remain useful without receiving unquestioning loyalty. Instantly can earn a place in the workflow without being presented as a miracle.

There is room for a less theatrical approach to all of this.

Find someone you have a legitimate reason to contact. Understand their situation. Use the appropriate channel. Say something worth reading.

And when they reply, have something useful to say back.

Disclosure: FreeMalta is an Instantly affiliate. If you subscribe through my referral link, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.