Project feature · Leads
The boring half of cold outreach, done for you
Finding who to email is most of the work and none of the fun. Point a campaign at a directory or a search, and CrawlProof finds the companies, finds the people, finds the addresses, and drafts the email — from your mailbox, in your words, about your thing.
3 credits a run (~$0.15). A run that finds nothing to do costs nothing.
It reads the directory like a person would
Most lead directories are a wall of JavaScript. Fetching the HTML gets you an empty shell, which is why so much of this work ends up being done by hand.
Renders the page
A real browser loads the listing, so AJAX results exist by the time anything is read.
Scrolls and clicks Next
Infinite-scroll lists are scrolled; paginated ones are stepped through, and stop the moment a page repeats itself.
Follows through to detail pages
A listing row is rarely the whole record, so entries are opened for the details the index leaves out.
Directories that name people, not companies
Plenty of the best lists give you a name, a title and a location and withhold the email — that is the product they are selling. Those are read as people: name, role, employer, location and profile links are kept, and the address becomes something to go and find rather than a reason to discard the lead.
Five places to look, cheapest first
The order is deliberate. Everything free is exhausted before anything paid is tried, so a run only spends on the prospects that genuinely publish nothing.
- 1
The site itself
Contact and about pages, footers, mailto: links, and the obfuscated addresses that are written to defeat scrapers.
- 2
Team & leadership pages
A named person outperforms a shared inbox, so /our-team, /leadership and /people are read before anything is paid for.
- 3
Linked PDFs
Capability statements, media kits and data-sheets routinely carry an address the page linking to them never mentions.
- 4
Search
Only now does a run spend on a search call — for the people it has a name for but no way to reach.
- 5
A role address, last
When a company publishes nothing at all, a conventional address like press@ is tried — and marked as a guess, not passed off as found.
The email can only say what you said
A campaign carries three things: who is writing, the one small thing you are asking for, and a list of checkable facts. Every draft is written from those and then checked against them — a draft that states something outside the list is thrown away rather than sent.
Grounded, not generated
An AI writing cold email will happily invent a credential, a client list or a statistic. This one is not allowed to: the guard is the feature.
Written for the recipient
Each draft opens with something specific to that company, taken from their own site — not a mail-merge of their domain name.
Describe the goal, get the fields
If writing an intro, an ask and a fact list sounds like homework, describe what you are trying to do and have the fields drafted from it.
Follow-ups that stop
At most two follow-ups on a schedule, and a reply ends the sequence — detected from your mailbox, not waiting on you to log it. Nobody gets a fourth email.
Sent from your mailbox
Give it the address you already send from and its settings are discovered automatically — the same lookup your mail client does. Replies come back to you, because the mail came from you.
Auto-discovered
Server, ports and encryption are resolved from your domain. The password is encrypted at rest with a key that is never in the database.
Verified before it is trusted
The connection is tested when you save it, so a typo surfaces then rather than as a campaign that quietly sends nothing.
Dry-run first
Leave auto-send off and drafts pile up for you to read. Turning it on is a deliberate act.
It will refuse to email some people
Cold outreach earns its reputation one careless send at a time. Privacy, legal, abuse, opt-out and accessibility addresses are never contacted, whatever a page publishes. A postal address for the footer is required before live sending is possible at all, because CAN-SPAM requires one. Anyone who asks to be left alone is suppressed across every campaign you run, permanently.
It reads the answers too
The same mailbox connection that sends is checked for what comes back, so a lead that answers is marked as answered without anybody remembering to do it — and the follow-up sequence stops on its own.
Out-of-office is not a reply
Auto-responders, bounces and mailing-list traffic are recorded and flagged rather than counted. Counting them would inflate the one number worth reporting.
Answers from a colleague still count
Mail to info@ often gets answered by a named person. A reply from anyone at the company is matched back to the lead it belongs to.
Opens, honestly
A per-email pixel, with loads from privacy proxies discarded rather than counted. It measures a floor: the real number is higher, never lower.
Nothing is marked by hand
Sent, opened, replied and closed are recorded as they happen — so a reply rate of zero means nobody answered, not that nobody logged it.
Your numbers, not somebody else's
Sends, opens, replies and closes are counted at three levels: the whole project, each campaign, and each individual run. Rates stay hidden until there is enough volume to mean anything — one reply out of three sends is not a 33% reply rate, and showing it as one invites a decision the sample cannot support.
What it costs
A campaign run is one pass of the whole funnel: discovery, contact lookup, drafting and sending. A run with nothing to do is not charged, so leaving a campaign switched on between batches is free.
For a one-off search of a directory, priced by how much you ask for. Find nothing and it is refunded.
Credits are the same ones scans and articles use — no separate plan, no subscription, and they do not expire. Volume packs bring a run down to about $0.08.
Lead generation runs on projects you own. You are responsible for the mail you send and for complying with the rules where your recipients are — CrawlProof enforces a suppression list and a footer address, not the law.