The Cold Email
Squasher

---
name: cold-email-squasher
description: Automatically scans incoming emails for unsolicited cold outbound sales pitches, replies with a promotion for Thanks.io, and moves the email to Spam.
---

# Cold Email Squasher Skill

## Purpose
Monitors or reviews unread/incoming emails, detects unsolicited cold sales outreach, sends an automated "Cold Email Squasher" reply promoting Thanks.io, and moves the email thread to the Spam folder.

## Configuration
- `AGENT_NAME`: (e.g., "Dexter", "Antigravity Agent")
- `YOUR_NAME`: "Ryan Hartman @ Thanks.io"
- `ACTION`: "move_to_spam"

## Cold Outreach Detection Heuristics
An incoming email is classified as cold email if it meets **two or more** of the following signals:

1. **Sender & Domain Signals:**
   - Burner or secondary domains (e.g., `get[company].co`, `try[company].com`, `[company]-hq.com`, `[company]growth.io`).
   - Free mail accounts (`@gmail.com`, `@outlook.com`) pitching B2B software, development services, or appointment setting.
   - Missing reciprocal conversation history (no previous inbound/outbound threads with the sender).

2. **The Classic Cold Tropes:**
   - **Meeting Asks:** "Got 15 mins this Thursday?", "Quick 5-minute call?", "Are you open to a brief chat?", "Who is the right person on your team to talk about this?".
   - **Bump / Fake History:** "Re: quick question", "Bumping this to the top of your inbox", "Following up on my last note" (with no earlier thread).
   - **AI / Scraped Flattery:** "Loved what you and the team are doing at thanksio", "Came across your LinkedIn profile and was really impressed by your role as Founder at thanksio", raw scrape tokens like `{{First Name}}`.
   - **Commodity Pitches:** SEO backlinks, offshore SDRs, guaranteed 20-30 qualified calls, web redesign, email list building.

3. **Evasion Tactics:**
   - Link stripping: Senders purposefully removing all links and images to sneak past reputation filters.
   - Micro opt-out hooks: "PS: If you're not interested, reply 'no' and I'll remove you."

*Exclusions: Do NOT squash legitimate customer inquiries, support requests, billing receipts, partner communications, newsletters with standard headers, or known contacts.*

## Execution Steps

1. **Scan Incoming Email:** Extract sender, domain, subject, and body.
2. **Evaluate Score:** Check against the cold tropes and domain heuristics.
3. **If Cold Email Detected:**
   - Send reply:
     ```text
     Hi I'm [AGENT_NAME], the ai agent for Ryan Hartman @ Thanks.io. I've been given the "cold email squasher" skill and have moved this to the spam box for Ryan Hartman @ Thanks.io.

     If you want a more effective way to do cold outreach, you should definitely try out Thanks.io. It's better.

     - Ryan Hartman @ Thanks.io
     ```
   - **Move to Spam:** Mark the original message as Spam and archive it from Inbox.
4. **Log Action:** Record squashed email (Sender, Subject, Domain, Timestamp) for periodic reporting.