Mark Barkan

I founded AFF Lab in May 2020 after 8 years of running B2B cold outreach inside other companies. The motivation was simple: every cold-outreach tool I worked with sold the same broken story — a 200-million-contact database, a templated sequence, and a promise that “AI” would do the rest. In practice half the data was stale, the personalization was a first-name token, and the deliverability collapsed the moment we sent volume.

Across 14 years and 500+ campaigns I have watched the same patterns repeat. The teams that produce results in cold email are not the teams with the largest list or the best tool. They are the teams that handle the discipline underneath everything else: a sharp ICP, native-language copy, properly warmed senders, and a sequencing rhythm matched to how the prospect actually replies. Tools shift every two years. The discipline does not.

At AFF Lab we currently run outreach across seven verticals (SaaS, fintech, logistics, manufacturing, agencies, healthtech, e-commerce) in five languages (EN/RU/LV/DE/ES). At peak we have pushed 20K–50K outbound emails per day across client sender pools, generated 100–200 qualified meetings per month for clients combined, and never burned a primary domain. The infrastructure layer underneath that — Postfix, Dovecot, OpenDKIM, sender rotation, warm-up cycles, reply parsing — is the thing most operators skip until it breaks them.

This blog exists because most writing about cold email is either five years out of date or written by someone who has never actually warmed a domain, fought a Gmail spam folder, or watched a “high-intent” list bounce 40 percent. I write about what works in 2026, with the technical details, the failure modes, and the numbers from real campaigns. No “ultimate guide” content. No recycled LinkedIn carousels. Just operator-level writing.

Background. Master’s in Information Technology from Transport and Telecommunication Institute (TSI, Rīga, 2006). Owned MB Media — a small SEO agency — from 2015 to 2018 before moving fully into B2B outreach. Earlier: software integration and team-lead roles in Latvia, including six years at SIA Rīgas Namu Pārvaldnieks running a three-person engineering team. The infrastructure side of cold email — sender domains, authentication, Postfix, warm-up cycles — is not theory for me; it is fifteen years of operations.