sent 400 cold emails, got 2 replies and now my domain lands in spam Cold Outreach

You sent cold mail from the domain that carries your transactional mail. That is the mistake, and everything else is downstream of it.

How it should be set up:

• cold outreach goes out from a separate lookalike domain you do not care about (getyourtool.com alongside yourtool.com), with its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC
• that domain gets warmed for four to six weeks before it sends anything real, ramping from 10 a day
• transactional mail lives on its own subdomain with its own DKIM key, so its reputation is scored separately from marketing

Recovery for what you have: stop all cold sending today, not next week. Keep sending only mail people asked for — receipts, resets, digests to engaged users. Reputation is a rolling window and it climbs back over three or four weeks if the recent signal is clean. Sign up for Google Postmaster Tools so you can see the curve instead of guessing at it.

A 0.5% reply rate is a targeting problem wearing a deliverability costume. 400 identical emails to a scraped directory is a list, not a segment.

Forty emails you actually researched will beat those 400 every time. The structure that works for me:

• one line proving you looked at their thing specifically, and it has to be something you could not have merge-fielded
• one line about a problem they have, in their words not yours
• one ask that costs them under two minutes

No links in the first email. Links hurt both deliverability and reply rate, and the first email does not need one.

Four follow-ups in eight days to someone who never asked to hear from you is what generated the complaints, and complaints are what actually killed the domain — not volume. Two follow-ups, day 4 and day 11, then stop forever. If they were going to reply they would have.

Concrete checks while you wait it out: run a message through mail-tester and read the whole report, check whether your sending IP is listed on Spamhaus or Barracuda, and verify DKIM is actually aligned with the From domain rather than the ESP's. Also find out whether your provider put you on a shared IP — if so you may be sharing a reputation with people worse than you.

400 emails, 2 replies, one incinerated domain. The list was the problem long before the deliverability was.