Cold email and inbox glossary
The key terms behind cold outreach, reply management, and team inbox collaboration, in plain language.
- Cold email
- An unsolicited email sent to a prospect you have no prior relationship with, used to start a sales, partnership, or recruiting conversation. Sent at volume across multiple accounts to protect deliverability.
- Unified inbox
- A single shared view that aggregates email from many separate accounts. For outreach teams, it means every reply from every sending inbox appears in one place instead of behind separate logins.
- Reply management
- The operational work of reading, assigning, responding to, and closing replies that come back from outreach, distinct from sending the campaigns in the first place.
- Sending account
- An email account used to send cold outreach. Teams run many to spread volume and protect deliverability, which is why replies end up scattered across them.
- Deliverability
- The likelihood that a sent email reaches the recipient's inbox rather than spam. Spreading volume across many accounts and domains is a common way to protect it.
- Thread assignment
- Giving ownership of a specific conversation to one teammate, so it is clear who is responsible for replying and nothing falls through the cracks.
- Internal note
- A private comment left on a conversation that is visible only to your team, never to the prospect (used for context, deal stage, or next steps).
- Thread status
- A label on a conversation indicating where it stands (for example, Open, Pending, or Closed) so a team can see what still needs action at a glance.
- Shared inbox
- An inbox multiple team members can view and work together, with visibility into who is handling what. The basis for collaborative reply management and the most common form of team email management software.
- IMAP
- A standard email protocol that lets an application access messages on a mail server. MyColdInbox uses IMAP to connect inboxes from providers beyond Gmail and Outlook.
- OAuth
- A secure authorization standard that lets you connect an account, like Gmail or Outlook, without sharing your password. Access can be revoked at any time.
- Speed to lead
- How quickly a team responds to an inbound reply. Faster responses to warm replies meaningfully improve the odds of booking a meeting or closing a deal.
- Email management
- The full operational process of receiving, sorting, assigning, responding to, and closing email, as distinct from sending it. For outreach teams the hard part is not any single email but the volume arriving across many separate accounts at once.
- Email management software
- Any tool that helps a person or team organise, prioritise, assign, or collaborate on email beyond what a default inbox offers. The category spans email clients, help desks, add-ons, and shared inboxes; MyColdInbox sits in the shared-inbox segment, built for multi-account outbound.
- Inbox management tools
- The individual capabilities that make email manageable at volume: unified views, filters, search, thread assignment, status labels, and internal notes. Most teams assemble these from several tools; a shared inbox platform combines them.
- Team email management
- Email handled by a group rather than one person, where the operational risks are duplicate replies, missed threads, and no clear ownership. Solved with shared visibility, explicit assignment, and per-thread status.
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