Plan the window
Defaults target 08:00–11:00 in the prospect's clock — the morning window where cold email replies are highest across every fleet I have looked at.
How it works
Zones
Your time zone is detected; prospect regions are a checklist of the twenty-four zones cold email lists actually contain.
Convert
The prospect's morning window is converted into your clock for each region, using real UTC offsets on today's date so daylight saving is right.
Overlap
Hours that fall in every region's morning at once are the overlap — one schedule for the whole list. If there is none, the notes say to split it.
Schedule
The grid and table give the hours to paste into the sending tool, with the per-inbox daily volume that window supports.
Why the hour matters
Filters do not score the time of day. People do. A cold email that arrives at 8:40 in the prospect's morning sits near the top of the inbox when they first open it, above the overnight newsletters. The same email at 3 a.m. their time is buried by nine, and the timestamp says a machine sent it. Across every fleet I have run numbers on, the 8-to-11 local window replies best, and the difference against overnight sends is not small.
The mistake this fixes
Most sending tools have one schedule per campaign: send between these hours, in this time zone. Teams set it to their own working hours and load a list that spans the US, the UK and Australia. The US half arrives before dawn, the Australians get it at dinner. The fix is dull — split the list by region and give each its own schedule — but it needs the hours worked out in your clock for every region, on the right day, with daylight saving accounted for. That is what the grid is.
Spread, do not burst
The window also sets a volume ceiling. Twenty inboxes at twenty-five a day each is five hundred messages; if the tool fires them all between 9:00 and 9:30 in the prospect's morning, it is a burst of five hundred from one domain family in half an hour, which is a pattern receivers notice. The per-hour cap in the form turns the window into a rate — six an hour over a three-hour window is eighteen per inbox per day, spread — and the sequence planner takes it from there.
Days
Tuesday to Thursday is the cautious default for a first touch; Monday mornings are crowded and Friday afternoons are dead. Follow-ups are less sensitive. If the list is in a market that works Sunday to Thursday — the Gulf, Israel — set the days accordingly, because a Friday send there is a Saturday send anywhere else.
Frequently asked questions
What is the best time to send cold email?
Between eight and eleven in the morning in the prospect's local time zone, Tuesday to Thursday. The tool converts that into your clock for each region.
Does send time affect deliverability?
Not directly — filters do not score the hour. It affects reply rate, because a message that arrives in the morning sits above the overnight backlog.
My prospects are in several time zones — what do I do?
Split the list by region and give each its own campaign schedule. If the overlap window is empty, one schedule cannot serve them all.
Does the planner handle daylight saving?
Yes. Offsets are computed for today's date from the IANA zone database in your browser, so US and European DST changes are reflected.
Why cap sends per hour?
So the window becomes a spread rather than a burst. Five hundred messages in thirty minutes from one domain family is a pattern; the same volume over three hours is not.
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