# Guard your sender reputation on cold outreach campaigns

> Every weekday morning, vet your pending leads for bad emails and low engagement scores, then only send personalized cold emails to the ones that pass.

- Workflow type: agent
- Services: Google Sheets, ZeroBounce, Gmail
- Categories: Sales, Marketing
- Published: 2026-05-19

## What it does

- Reads pending rows from your outreach queue spreadsheet every weekday morning.
- Checks each address for deliverability issues like disposable, spam-trap, abuse, and invalid emails.
- Scores each lead's engagement likelihood and skips anyone below your quality threshold.
- Drafts and sends a short, personalized cold email from your Gmail account to qualified leads only.
- Writes the verdict, the score, and the outcome back into your sheet so you always know why a lead was sent or skipped.

## What you'll need

- A Google account with an outreach queue spreadsheet (columns for name, company, email, talking point, and status).
- A Gmail account that you want to send the cold emails from.
- A ZeroBounce account for email validation and AI quality scoring.

## Prompt

Build an agent workflow that gates a cold outreach campaign so we never burn sender reputation on a junk list. The agent framing is right because the per-row decision combines multiple signals and the drafting step is open-ended.

Trigger: cron, every weekday (Monday through Friday) at 9am in the user's local timezone.

Step 1. Use Google Sheets Get Values to read pending rows from the 'outreach_queue' tab of the user's spreadsheet. The columns are: name, company, email, talking_point, status. Process every row where the status column is empty. Skip rows where status is already filled in (they've been handled in a previous run).

Step 2. For each empty-status row, call ZeroBounce Validate Email on the email address, then call ZeroBounce AI Email Scoring on the same address. Capture the deliverability verdict (status / sub-status) and the AI score (0 to 10).

Step 3. Decide what to do with the row based on the combined signals:

- If the ZeroBounce verdict is invalid, abuse, spamtrap, or disposable, do NOT send. Mark the row's status as 'skipped: bad_email'.

- Else if the AI score is below 8, do NOT send. Mark the row's status as 'skipped: low_score'. (Note to the user: 9 is a conservative cutoff, 8 is balanced. Pick one and stick with it.)

- Otherwise, draft a short, personalized cold email using the talking_point column for context. Keep it under 120 words, plain text, no marketing fluff, and end with a single soft call to action. Send it from the user's Gmail account using Gmail Send a Message.

Step 4. After each row is processed, use Google Sheets Update Values to write back to that row: the new status ('sent', 'skipped: bad_email', or 'skipped: low_score'), the ZeroBounce verdict, and the AI score. Leaving these reasons in the sheet matters because the operator may want to manually re-check borderline cases (e.g. a 7.9 score for a known good prospect).

Process rows sequentially so a failure on one row never blocks the others, and so the agent can log a clear per-row outcome. At the end of the run, log a one-line summary: how many rows processed, how many sent, how many skipped for bad email, and how many skipped for low score.

## How to customize

- Change the send time or the days of the week the campaign runs.
- Adjust the AI score cutoff (9 is conservative, 8 is balanced) and which deliverability verdicts count as a skip.
- Edit the email tone, opening line, signature, or call to action the agent uses when drafting.

## FAQ

### Why does this protect my sender reputation?

Sending to invalid, disposable, or spam-trap addresses causes bounces and complaints, which inbox providers use to throttle or block future emails. Filtering those out before anything goes out keeps your domain in good standing.

### What happens to leads that get skipped?

They stay in the sheet with a clear reason written next to them, like 'skipped: bad_email' or 'skipped: low_score', along with the ZeroBounce verdict and AI score. An operator can review borderline cases and manually re-queue them if they want.

### Can I change the quality threshold?

Yes. The agent uses an AI score cutoff that you control. A score of 9 is conservative and only emails very high-quality leads, while 8 is more balanced. You can tune it up or down at any time.

### Does the agent write the email itself?

Yes. For each lead that passes both checks, the agent drafts a short personalized cold email using the talking point you've recorded for that row, then sends it through Gmail.

### What if my sheet uses different column names?

You can rename columns and update the prompt to match. As long as you have an email column, a personalization column, and a status column the agent can write to, it will work.

Use this prompt in General Input: https://www.generalinput.com/prompts/guard-your-sender-reputation-on-cold-outreach-campaigns