Cold email isn't getting more popular. Selling cold email is.
r/sales looks like it is in a cold email boom: 2026 is on pace for more posts naming cold email than any year since at least 2021. We classified all 1,304 of them, 2021 to 2026, and the boom is not practitioners. Posts from people running cold email have sat between 160 and 190 a year since 2022. The growth is people selling it — agencies, tools, courses, guides that end in a pitch. They wrote 17% of the cold email posts in 2024. This year they wrote half: 125 of 250 through September, 50.0%.
Published October 9, 2026
What was counted
Every post in r/sales from January 2021 to September 2026 whose title contains "cold email", "cold emails" or "cold emailing", pulled from the Arctic Shift archive of Reddit. Each post's title and opening lines were classified into one of three groups: promo (the author is selling or building an audience: vendor and tool posts, agency self-promotion, service offers, "how I booked N meetings" guide-bait, hiring ads), practitioner (a genuine question, request for critique, shared problem or neutral experience), or other (job seeking, breaking into sales, unrelated). The same was done for titles naming cold calling, as a comparison.
We sell cold email campaigns, so a market full of sellers is the water we swim in. That is also why we counted it: the posts our prospects read are increasingly written by people with something to sell, and nobody had put a number on it.
The table
| Year | Posts naming cold email | Practitioner | Promo | Promo share |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 150 | 108 | 32 | 21.3% |
| 2022 | 228 | 189 | 23 | 10.1% |
| 2023 | 193 | 165 | 21 | 10.9% |
| 2024 | 209 | 164 | 35 | 16.7% |
| 2025 | 274 | 192 | 79 | 28.8% |
| 2026 (Jan–Sep) | 250 | 122 | 125 | 50.0% |
Counts for r/sales. Rows do not sum to the posts column because the "other" group (job seekers, people breaking into sales) is not shown; it is in the CSV below, along with r/b2bmarketing and the cold calling counts.
108 different accounts wrote the 2026 promo posts
The 35 promo posts of 2024 came from 26 different accounts. The 125 promo posts of January to September 2026 came from 108. Removing reposts (same account, same title, same year) leaves the 2026 promo share at 50%, which rules out one tool spamming its way to the number: a lot of people showed up to sell at the same time.
Meanwhile the practitioners went quiet-ish: 164 practitioner posts in 2024, 122 in the first nine months of 2026, on pace for about the same count as every year since 2022. More cold email discussion exists on Reddit than ever, and almost all of the growth is people selling shovels.
Cold calling, for comparison
Cold calling posts in r/sales show the same drift at half the strength: the promo share went from 8% in 2024 to 14% in January to September 2026, with a peak of 17% in 2025. Practitioner posts about cold calling run at 550 in 2024 and 371 in the first nine months of 2026, roughly level on pace. Whatever is pulling sellers into cold email content is pulling them about twice as hard as into cold calling.
The flood reached a second subreddit
r/b2bmarketing had 25 posts naming cold email in all of 2024 and 276 in the first nine months of 2026, with 54% of the 2026 posts being promo. We keep r/b2bmarketing out of the main table because a subreddit going from near-zero to hundreds of posts changes what is being measured mid-series; r/sales published 20,000 to 36,000 posts a year across the whole window, so its share is a like-for-like comparison. Both subreddits are in the CSV.
How posts were classified
5,166 posts across both subreddits and both terms were classified by Claude Opus 5.5 from the title and the first lines of the post. We hand-checked 59 of its labels across both terms, all years and all three classes: 1 clear disagreement and 5 borderline calls we would let stand, so about 2% disagreement, and none of the checked promo labels flipped. Titles were matched by the spelled-out phrase, pulling each spelling ("cold email", "cold emails", "cold emailing") separately from the archive, because the archive's search matches exact words only.
What this measures: posts whose title names the channel, in one large sales subreddit. It says nothing about whether cold email works; our reply rate by month series covers that. A promo label says only that the author has something to sell; plenty of promo posts contain decent advice.
Download the full table (both subreddits, both terms, all classes): cold-email-gold-rush-2021-2026.csv.
Sources
- Arctic Shift archive of Reddit posts, pulled October 9, 2026.
- Sales.co classification of 5,166 Reddit post titles, October 2026.