ColdMail – Self-Hosted Cold Email Outreach Platform
ColdMail is a self-hosted, multi-tenant cold email outreach platform designed to streamline B2B lead generation, campaign management, and automated email follow-ups. It helps businesses discover potential customers through Google Maps, organize business contacts, create personalized email templates, and run scheduled outreach campaigns using Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) or any supported SMTP server.
Key Features
Business Lead Generation: Search Google Maps by business category, keyword, and location to collect business names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, and email addresses found on business websites. Search multiple keywords across multiple locations, monitor scraping progress, and import the collected leads into organized lists.
Lead Management: Import leads from CSV and Excel files, add contacts manually, organize them into named lists, and track lead statuses throughout the outreach process. Address screening helps identify unusable email addresses, while configurable import policies can skip consumer email providers or role-based addresses.
Campaign Management: Create campaigns using selected lead lists and reusable email templates. Configure daily sending limits, campaign-specific time windows, and time zones, then start, pause, resume, or restart campaigns as needed. Active campaigns can also synchronize newly added leads.
Personalized Emails and Automated Follow-Ups: Build reusable plain-text email templates with variables such as {{ first_name }}, {{ company }}, and {{ city }}. Configure follow-up sequences by day offset to support consistent outreach over time. Email sending is paced according to scheduling rules, provider limits, and retry settings.
Bounce and Reply Tracking: Monitor sending outcomes and process incoming replies and bounce notifications through IMAP mailbox polling or Amazon SES/SNS webhooks. Record failed deliveries and failure reasons, track lead status changes, and use campaign activity pages and diagnostic tools to investigate sending issues.
Unsubscribe and Contact Preferences: Include tokenized unsubscribe links, RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe support, and the sender's postal address in commercial email footers. Unsubscribed, bounced, replied-to, and blocked leads are excluded by the sending safeguards to prevent unwanted repeat outreach.
Multi-Tenant Workspaces and Team Collaboration: Each workspace maintains its own leads, campaigns, templates, scraping jobs, and sending configuration. Invite teammates and assign owner, admin, manager, or viewer roles with different capabilities for campaign operations and workspace administration.
Dashboard and Diagnostics: Monitor sending activity, campaign performance, bounce and reply rates, lead-pipeline status, daily sending usage, queued jobs, and worker health. Built-in management commands help investigate scraper jobs, audit email addresses, diagnose bounces, and check mailbox connectivity.
Technology and Architecture
ColdMail is built with Django 5.2, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, Tailwind CSS 4, and DaisyUI 5. Playwright with headless Chromium powers Google Maps scraping. Email delivery supports Amazon SES and SMTP, while inbound processing uses IMAP and SES/SNS webhooks.
Its asynchronous job queue is backed by PostgreSQL, avoiding the need for separate Redis, Celery, or message-broker infrastructure. Dedicated workers handle email-related tasks and lead scraping independently, helping prevent lengthy scraping jobs from delaying queued email operations.
The platform also provides authenticated API endpoints for leads, campaigns, emails, templates, sending configuration, roles, access settings, and scraper jobs.
ColdMail is designed for businesses that want greater control over their outreach infrastructure, sending configuration, and operational data through a self-hosted platform that brings lead discovery, campaign execution, follow-up scheduling, and email feedback into one system.