cold-outreach

cold-outreach is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from ericrisco/rsc-harness. It costs 91 tokens per session (4,136 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide for writing unsolicited one-to-one emails or LinkedIn messages and planning the follow-up schedule. It covers the message wording, timing, sending limits, mailbox warm-up, and opt-out text.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to write first-contact messages, create four-to-seven-step follow-up sequences, set spacing and per-inbox limits, and add a compliant opt-out footer.
Why use it?
It separates the writing and follow-up cadence from tasks such as finding prospects, configuring email authentication, and managing replies in a sales system.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Written for no agent in particular: nothing here depends on one.

Good fit Use it to write first-contact messages, create four-to-seven-step follow-up sequences, set spacing and per-inbox limits, and add a compliant opt-out footer.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add ericrisco/rsc-harness --skill cold-outreach
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/ericrisco/rsc-harness

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for cold-outreach

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for cold-outreach

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/ericrisco/rsc-harness/cold-outreach.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 91 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,136 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00091 $0.04136
Opus 5 $0.00046 $0.02068
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00827
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00414

Measured 10d ago against content hash 29fb7a0ca177, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-09, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-outreach scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 10d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (scripts/verify.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

skills/cold-outreach/SKILL.md · 186 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 186 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Outreach — The Words and the Cadence of the Cold Touch

You write the message a stranger actually replies to, and the sending rhythm that keeps the mailbox provider delivering it. You do not set up DNS, source the list, or run the CRM.

This skill owns two things and only two: the copy of an unsolicited 1:1 touch (cold email, LinkedIn note/DM) and the cadence around it (step count, spacing, per-inbox volume, warm-up ramp, the compliant footer). Everything upstream and downstream belongs to a sibling — route by naming the owner, do not improvise their job:

The ask Owner Why it is not here
Find / scrape / qualify the prospect list or ICP lead-gen This skill assumes you already have a verified recipient.
Set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC, a tracking domain, or diagnose DNS-level spam landing email-deliverability This skill applies the provider rules to cadence; it does not configure auth.
Manage what happens after a reply — stages, tasks, CRM hygiene, close forecast sales-pipeline The moment a reply lands the relationship leaves this skill.
Write the proposal / SOW / pricing after a prospect engages proposals A cold touch earns a conversation, not a contract.
Inbound launch emails, nurture to an opted-in list, marketing-site copy marketing (../marketing/SKILL.md) Opted-in and broadcast copy is a different game from a 1:1 cold touch.
Actually wire the send through Gmail/an ESP API or a scheduler email-connector / google-workspace This skill produces text + a plan; it does not push the send.

The reply-rate reality (calibrate before you write)

Cold email is a low-yield channel by nature, and most "improve my copy" requests are really "stop fighting the math." Set expectations against the 2026 band:

  • Average reply rate ≈ 3.43%. Top quartile ≈ 5.5%. Elite (top 10%) ≈ 10.7%+. (Instantly Cold Email Benchmark Report 2026, accessed 2026-06-02.)
  • So 5-10% is solid, 10%+ is excellent, under 2% means something upstream is broken — usually the list or the deliverability, not the prose.

Read the full file on GitHub · 186 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 10d ago First seen · 186 lines · 91 tokens per session scan A 29fb7a0ca177

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-outreach is a skill published in the GitHub repository ericrisco/rsc-harness (78 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 91 tokens to every session and 4,136 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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