Let's not beat around the bush; mass cold emails are SPAM with another name.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.
At this point, I just assume anyone cold emailing me is seeking to extract information around my employer’s technical environment for malicious reasons. The questions they keep asking seem to indicate as much.
I’m reaching out as I want to learn more about the database technology you’re using, and if you’re having any problems with it. Such as scalability, performance, data siloing, costs, etc. We’re curious to hear from software engineers working with production databases.
I'm not sure what attack vector they're going to uncover from knowing the database you use, given there is a relatively small number of databases anyway—they're already in a position to guess (brute force) themselves into your system if just knowing the database was enough.
Maybe you think they are looking to get your guard down and then ask the juicier questions?
In this case I’d wager they’re just looking to sell to us. If they were malicious however, replying to the email would let the sender know about my position within the organization and how inclined I am to sharing information.
At the end of the day there’s no upside to either me nor my organization to respond to cold emails beyond politeness.
I receive about 10 cold emails a week, and most senders never give up on sending follow-ups. Those AI emails get worse every day, and the follow-ups become more and more passive-aggressive: "I guess you are not the person who can make this decision. Could you forward me to..." No, I am not doing your job for you. They try to make you angry to chase a reply at every cost.
Here is a tip for people on the other end of this madness: If you receive Spam, mark it as such to blacklist the sender from Gmail and help others because Google is losing the war against Spam like they are with the SEO. Let them hang with their own rope.