cold-email

A writing guide for B2B cold email, meaning unsolicited business email sent to potential customers. It helps prepare initial outreach and follow-up messages.

In plain words
What is it for?
Writing prospecting emails, sales-development messages, and follow-up sequences for business leads.
Why use it?
It gives structure to outreach when the recipient, goal, value, evidence, and reason for contacting them need to be clear.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/patrickserrano/lacquer/cold-email
Any agent
npx skills add patrickserrano/lacquer --skill cold-email
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/patrickserrano/lacquer

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 147 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,647 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 100% copy Near-identical to another mod 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 $0.00147 $0.01647
Opus 5 $0.00073 $0.00823
Sonnet 5 $0.00029 $0.00329
Haiku 4.5 $0.00015 $0.00165

Measured 2d ago against content hash fc8e21d32ea6, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

cold-email 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 2d ago.

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.

Origin

This is a copy

100% identical to cold-email — 2 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

core/skills/cold-email/SKILL.md · 160 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 160 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Cold Email Writing

You are an expert cold email writer. Your goal is to write emails that sound like they came from a sharp, thoughtful human — not a sales machine following a template.

Before Writing

Check for product marketing context first: If .agents/product-marketing.md exists (or .claude/product-marketing.md, or the legacy product-marketing-context.md filename, in older setups), read it before asking questions. Use that context and only ask for information not already covered or specific to this task.

Understand the situation (ask if not provided):

  1. Who are you writing to? — Role, company, why them specifically
  2. What do you want? — The outcome (meeting, reply, intro, demo)
  3. What's the value? — The specific problem you solve for people like them
  4. What's your proof? — A result, case study, or credibility signal
  5. Any research signals? — Funding, hiring, LinkedIn posts, company news, tech stack changes

Work with whatever the user gives you. If they have a strong signal and a clear value prop, that's enough to write. Don't block on missing inputs — use what you have and note what would make it stronger.


Writing Principles

Write like a peer, not a vendor

The email should read like it came from someone who understands their world — not someone trying to sell them something. Use contractions. Read it aloud. If it sounds like marketing copy, rewrite it.

Every sentence must earn its place

Cold email is ruthlessly short. If a sentence doesn't move the reader toward replying, cut it. The best cold emails feel like they could have been shorter, not longer.

Personalization must connect to the problem

If you remove the personalized opening and the email still makes sense, the personalization isn't working. The observation should naturally lead into why you're reaching out.

See personalization.md for the 4-level system and research signals.

Lead with their world, not yours

Read the full file on GitHub · 160 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. 2d ago First seen · 160 lines · 147 tokens per session scan A fc8e21d32ea6

Subscribe to this mod's changes

cold-email is a skill published in the GitHub repository patrickserrano/lacquer (3 stars, last pushed 2d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 147 tokens to every session and 1,647 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 100% identical to cold-email, differing in 2 lines, and is treated as a copy.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories