Come up with any good New Year’s resolutions yet? Here’s a thought: if you’ve ever committed one of the six cold email sins below, avoid repeating those mistakes in the future.

These email personalities showcase a variety of problems—self-obsession, laziness, ridiculously long messages—but they have one thing in common. They do nothing to make the reader feel valued.

Making a recipient feel like 1 of 1,000 is a surefire way to turn them off. Sometimes, this is unintentional, like forgetting to personalize a message. Other times, it’s blatant and obnoxious, such as outlining your thoughts on random topics that have nothing to do with the sender’s business. And sometimes, pointless formatting is to blame. Whatever the reason, these messages are perfect examples of how lack of focus on the sender will ruin an email.

Without further ado, here are our latest Hall of Shame personas to avoid.

1. The Mad Libber

Crimes: infomercial-quality writing, zero personalization

There are a bunch of issues with this email (copy errors, features instead of benefits), but what really stands out is its overly general, infomercial-like quality.

Lines like “. . . we take the time, headache, and frustration out of finding a business loan . . .” sound as if they belong on a roadside billboard—or in a book of Mad Libs, with certain words removed: “we take the [noun], [noun], and [noun] out of [verb ending in ing] a business loan.”

Meanwhile, the intended market here is more general than a TV audience from the 1990s. The email assumes pretty much any business has cashflow problems, then offers a list of features that address substantially different financial needs.

Extra-general sentences and information is perfect when you’re Mad Libbing around the Christmas tree with family. When it comes to cold email, it’s a one-way ticket to the trash.

2. Mr. Robot

Crimes: stiff language, vague requests and benefits

This email is all about asking me for things without revealing anything about who the sender is, what they do, or where my proposed article would eventually wind up.

The vagueness doesn’t stop there, though. “I was made aware of your blog post here” only directs me to a website of marketing links and no mention of SalesFolk anywhere. Then there’s “ . . . publish blogs that are related to the business industry.” Business is not an industry, technically. Even if you bent that rule, you’d still be left wondering which aspect of business this sender is referring to. Sales? Writing? Shoe manufacturing?

Personal pet peeve: the sentence length here is almost perfectly uniform, which suggests Siri actually wrote this email. If you want to keep your reader’s attention, vary sentence length to keep the flow natural.

3. The Disaster

Crimes: misleading copy, poor grammar, sloppy style  

Under no circumstances should you ever kick off a cold email by joking about a religious figure. And that’s the lightest of this email’s crimes. More concerning is the complete mess that makes up the rest of the copy.

There’s no consistent punctuation to speak of, only a jumble of commas and colons. Lines like “No, we are not trying to sell anything, no we don’t have any other schemes up our sleeves, please bear with me 1 more second of your time” make me think the sender did a brain dump straight into the email and never followed it with a proofread.

Speaking of “no schemes up our sleeves,” this entire email is a scheme, just a badly masked one. It’s totally trying to push something on me (getting my feedback), despite claims to the contrary. Though, honestly, I don’t think this person meant to be deceptive. This email is more a case of disorganized thoughts, poor copy, and too many ideas packed into a single message.

4. The Pretender

Crimes: empty sentences, no benefits, potentially misleading claims

The Pretender is a cousin to The Slacker—they never put much effort into their cold emails. But unlike their cousin, who doesn’t care what you think, The Pretender really wants you to believe they’ve gone above and beyond for you.

Like most pretenders, this one doesn’t do a very good job of masking their laziness. The message is full of empty, obvious information (“I would love to introduce myself”). The subject line speaks for itself in terms of quality. And the message also promises me a list of technical errors on my site, but gives no clues as to what those errors might be. I’m inclined to believe the 12-page doc promised doesn’t actually exist yet, and that it’s mentioned in the email because that sounds nice.

In cold email, where you have seconds to capture a person’s attention, every single word counts. Set aside time for checking your work—often more than once—before you send it out. When someone’s too lazy to take those steps, it usually shows.

PS: What’s with the green line of text in the middle?

5. Ms. Vain

Crimes: long-winded, self-focused

This email should be about a quarter of the length it is currently. But when you spend a bunch of time talking about yourself, the words are bound to pile up.

The only parts of this email acknowledging my existence is that the sender came across us and that we’re invited pay a lot of money to test out their service. I can buy a farming robot for my backyard for $3,000; why would I spend that money on someone who doesn’t take the time to ask me why I might need their PR services?

It’s great that this particular company has gotten accolades from some high-profile publications. That isn’t the same thing as including good social proof, which, in cold email, uses past success stories and stats to entice the potential customer. Listing NYT and Wired in this context only makes the email sound more self-obsessed, and is as empty as telling someone you came across their company.

6. Clueless

Crimes: random, irrelevant information, hypocrisy

Part of the trouble here is the email’s length: it’s the digital equivalent of the guy at the party who won’t stop talking about himself.

But even half as long, this message would still come off as obnoxious and self obsessed. Because like the guy at the party, who will talk about anything just to hear the sound of his own voice, this sender strings a bunch of unrelated topics into an email without any apparent purpose. What do cryptocurrencies, digital spreadsheets, and a forthcoming book have in common? I don’t know, based on this email.

Finally, the email ends with “networking advice” and an instruction to “stay focused.” You’ve heard the mantra practice what you preach? Clearly, this person didn’t.

We get tons of cold emails over here at SalesFolk, but they’re not all created equal in terms of quality. For every enticing message that lays out clear benefits and asks helpful questions, there are 10 that commit email crimes like laziness, being too self-focused, or asking us to do all the work.

While it would be nice to never get emails like these at all, they do offer some great real-world lessons for salespeople, marketers, and anyone interested in attracting customers over email.

As part of our SalesFolk Hall of Shame, we’ve collected some of the most offensive cold email personalities to grace our inboxes recently, and called them out for their crimes. For a lesson in what not to do, read on:

1. The Flatterer

Email Crimes: insincerity, false flattery

Imitation is not always flattery. This person uses one of Heather’s old cold email templates from a few years back, but completely butchers it. “Quick question” is way overused as a subject line now, and it’s also misleading, since the message that follows is anything but quick.

And speaking of flattery: this person needs a lesson in how to make it sound convincing. The opening pleasantry screams of false concern. The paragraph that follows it is nothing more than a thinly disguised setup for the sender’s real intentions, which is to talk about their creative agency.

If given the choice, I would rather someone drop me three lines of text asking outright if I need creative services, rather than assume I’m not smart enough to see through fake niceties.

2. The Entitled Recruiter

Email Crimes: laziness, creating extra work

Occasionally, we get excited about a cold email and include too many asks in one message.

This email goes to new extremes. The sender doesn’t just accidentally include a long CTA or one too many questions. They expect the recipient to complete multiple steps in order to even get to the so-called benefit: read this job description; reply if they’re interested; reply if they’re not interested; submit names of other potential candidates.

Long story short, the sender wants the recipient to do the work. They clearly haven’t properly researched relevant candidates, and instead, expect that and all other useful information to come from others. This is the sort of email that won’t just annoy people; it could outright offend them.

3. The Slacker

Email Crimes: laziness, lack of research

This one reads like it was written at 5 p.m. on a Friday when the sender realized they were a few outbound emails short of their weekly requirement.

Everything in here could apply to just about any recipient, whether that’s a VP of B2B Software Sales or someone working at the Nike flagship store. Seriously, what company doesn’t prospect or do lead generation? Who doesn’t want to “rapidly grow their sales?”

On top of that, the text is full of obvious typos and grammatical errors that add an extra layer of unprofessionalism. One glance at this message, and people will move on.

4. The Marketing Bot

Email Crimes: lack of personalization, marketing disguised as sales

This would be a relatively inoffensive message—if the sender had simply made it a marketing promotion instead of trying to convince me it’s a cold sales email.

Besides covering way too much information for one email, this message completely lacks the kind of personal touches that make cold email successful. There are no benefits, just a gratuitous feature list. And using “Heather R” in the name field immediately gives away the game: I’m one of probably 1,000 names scraped out of a CRM and thrown into a marketing-automation tool.

There is definitely a time and place for marketing promotions. As part of a cold email campaign isn’t one of them.

Pro tip: always clean up your CRM data before you send your messages.

5. The Jargon Specialist

Email Crimes: vague, relies on jargon, sloppy

“CRM Specialist” definitely pops up on LinkedIn now and then as an actual job title—but that doesn’t mean we should go around using it with total strangers. The phrase is business jargon at its finest: vague, pretentious, and not descriptive of any real job at a company. Presumably, anyone using a CRM in their day-to-day work is a kind of specialist.

The rest of the message is just as vague. It doesn’t tell me why this mysterious candidate might be a good fit for my company or what skills they can bring to the ones I already employ. Finally, the text is messy, with bland, redundant wording and a couple of typos that should never wind up in any kind of email, cold or not.

6. The Desperate Wannabe

Email Crimes: trying too hard, too much information

This person really, really wants to come off as one of those warm, bubbly types you just can’t help but reply to. But a salutation that reads “Hey!” just screams that the sender wants to appear chill when they are actually desperate for a response.

Then there are the multiple links to promotional materials, along with three different CTAs that aren’t so much about my taking action as they are about the sender wanting to seem cheerful. Had they spent more time cleaning up run-on sentences and outlining why I could benefit from animation videos, I might have been more interested in the product.

Seen any other cringeworthy cold email stereotypes that deserve a place in our Hall of Shame roundup? Send them to [email protected] for consideration. The weirder/wackier the cold email “personality” nominated, the better.