How Vine Trading Uses Mailshake to Avoid Spam and Save Hours on Outreach

Sujan Patel

May 8, 2026

Contents

Cold email doesn’t fail because people write bad messages, but because those messages never reach the inbox. Simon Clare of Vine Trading learned this the hard way.

He was sending cold emails manually using Word mail merge from a shared server that kept getting him marked as spam. Every send was a gamble, and Simon was losing more hours than he cared to count.

Then he switched to Mailshake.

Now Simon sends 999 emails per day with no spam flags. His list has shrunk from 10,000 to 5,500 contacts, but every single one is real. He can pause campaigns when his pipeline gets full and restart them with one click when he needs more deals.

In this case study, we’ll walk through:

Why mail merge on a shared server is a recipe for disaster
How Mailshake fixed Simon’s deliverability
Why a smaller list meant better results
The one metric Simon tracks that tells him everything he needs to know

Let’s learn how he did it.

Introducing Vine Trading

Vine Trading buys clearance products from all over the world and sells them in America, Europe, and the UK. If a company has too much stock, like a pallet of electronics, a container of clothing, or a warehouse of discontinued home goods, Vine Trading takes it off their hands.

Simon handles the outreach. Every month, he sits down with his collection of contacts gathered from trade shows, online research, and years of industry relationships. Then he sends a simple email to every supplier asking if they have any clearance.

Most people are actually happy to hear from him. They’re trying to move product, and he’s trying to buy it. In a strange way, his emails are welcome, except for the very first one. That first email is cold. And that’s where things started to go wrong.

The Outreach Challenges Before Mailshake

“I had to go back in the list and start sending from that point,” Simon remembers. “It was a whole, oh, it was a real difference right there.” He’s describing what happened every time his email send failed.

Before Mailshake, Simon’s outreach ran on Word mail merge and whatever server happened to be available. At his previous company, that setup worked well enough because they had their own server.

But Vine Trading was a new startup running on shared hosting, the kind of setup that works fine for a website but doesn’t hold up very well for high-volume email sending. Here’s what made outreach so difficult:

Spam flags crashed everything. Vine Trading’s shared server started flagging his messages as spam. “Sending it out through Word, it would be spammed occasionally,” he says. “I’d be marked as spam, and that would pull everything down.”
No resume point after failure. When a spam flag took down his send, Simon had no idea where it stopped. He’d scroll back through contacts, trying to guess the right place to restart. Wrong guesses meant either skipping people or sending duplicates.
No bounce handling. His master list had grown to 10,000 contacts over years of trade research and was packed with dead addresses and closed businesses. This meant every send was full of invisible bounces that Simon couldn’t see and had no way to track.
Manual setup for everything. Simon is a sourcer, not a systems administrator. Manual sending ate up hours he could have spent sourcing deals, and that’s not counting the time he spent trying to troubleshoot when his emails ended up in spam.

Simon just wanted his messages to land in people’s inboxes. But he had zero visibility into what was working, what was bouncing, or why his emails kept disappearing into spam.

Simon needed deliverability, resume-after-failure, auto-bounce-handling, and a dead-simple setup that he could use from his home office without a technical background. Mailshake gave him all four.

How Vine Trading Uses Mailshake to Improve Deliverability and Save Time

Here’s how Simon puts Mailshake to work:

1. Monthly Outreach to Suppliers

Every month (or so), when the pipeline starts to feel a little thin, Simon opens Mailshake and starts a campaign asking suppliers if they have any clearance products they’re looking to move.

There’s no complex sequencing or aggressive follow-up strategy. Just a consistent touchpoint that keeps Vine Trading top of mind until the timing is right on the supplier’s side.

2. High-Volume Sending Without the Manual Effort

When Simon is actively sending, he pushes about 999 emails per day. That’s the volume he’s comfortable with, but only because Mailshake handles everything behind the scenes without breaking a sweat.

Before Mailshake, sending that many emails meant hours of manual work and constant anxiety about spam flags. Now, the platform spaces out the sends, manages the timing, and makes sure each email has the best possible chance of landing in the primary inbox.

3. Automatic Bounce Detection That Cleans His List for Him

Even after Simon ran his list through a third-party list cleaning tool, he still saw outdated contacts slipping through, like old emails, closed businesses, and dead inboxes.

Mailshake helped him find those issues. Over time, the original 10,000-contact list has shrunk to about 5,500 contacts. That sounds like a loss, but Simon sees it as a win. Every one of those 4,500 removed addresses was wasting his time and hurting his sender’s reputation.

Now Simon’s list is smaller but full of real people at real companies who actually might have clearance to sell.

4. Pause and Resume Campaigns Based on Real Deal Flow

Right now, Simon isn’t sending anything at all, something he couldn’t do before. With his old process, stopping and starting was a nightmare because he could never be sure where he’d left off.

After Mailshake, Vine Trading has so many deals in progress that they’ve temporarily paused outreach to make sure they can fulfill everything without overextending their capital. “We’re not sending because we want to check that we can afford to do those deals,” he explains.

When he’s ready to start again, “Probably … next week,” he says, Simon will log back into Mailshake and restart his campaign with one click.

5. Track Email Delivery Through Simple Metrics

Simon doesn’t track reply rates or conversion funnels or pipeline velocity. He tracks one thing: more opens than bounces. “That’s real success,” he says. And that simple metric tells him everything he needs to know.

Before Mailshake, Simon couldn’t even see his bounces. They were invisible and silently damaged his sender reputation while he kept blasting the same dead addresses month after month.

Mailshake Features That Made the Difference

Simon needs a handful of features that work reliably, every single time. Here’s what made the difference for him:

Deliverability protection. The shared server at Vine Trading was a spam magnet, and Simon’s emails kept getting caught in the crossfire. Mailshake’s deliverability infrastructure makes sure his messages now land in the primary inbox instead of spam.
Campaign management. Mailshake handles the timing, tracking, and resume automatically. This is why Simon can now pause his outreach when his pipeline gets full. And if something interrupts a campaign, the platform can pick up exactly where it left off.
List management. Simon had spent years building his list, but he’d never had a system for maintaining it. With Mailshake, he can now import contacts in bulk, segment them however he needs, and trust that the platform will help him keep everything organized.

What Simon Learned (So You Don’t Have To)

Simon doesn’t claim to be an expert. But here are a few things his experience taught him that anyone doing cold outreach can learn from:

Your server matters more than your email copy. If you’re sending high volumes of email from shared hosting, you’re going to have problems. It’s not a question of if, but when.

A smaller, cleaner list beats a bigger, dirtier list every time. Those 4,500 addresses removed from Simon’s list were dead weight and were hurting his sender reputation. Now he does more with a smaller list.
The best tool is the one you don’t have to think about. Simon’s favorite thing about Mailshake isn’t any single feature. “I’m an old guy, 51, working from home in London,” Simon says with a laugh. “Mailshake just works. I don’t have to think about it.”

Take a Free Mailshake Demo

Mailshake gives Simon the one thing he needed most: peace of mind. He doesn’t have to worry about spam flags, invisible bounces that would damage his reputation, or limiting his email volume.

And when an email lands and someone replies with “yes, we have clearance to move,” Mailshake has already done its job.

So if you’re never quite sure whether your emails are landing, where your sends stopped, or why your list seems to be working against you, then you’re in the same place Simon was. But you don’t have to stay there.

Take a demo to see how Mailshake can help your emails actually land.