Zeno Rocha
On Latent Space
“The whole way of thinking about email marketing and email in general is you need to do exactly what an abuser wouldn't do. It's the opposite of that. … They send a lot of emails all at once and then they never send again. So you kind of got to reverse engineer how phishing works and build a platform that does exactly the opposite of that.”
Latent Space · AI Builders · November 2026
Context
Asked how much of Resend's sending and trust system is automated, Zeno Rocha described abusers who show up with thousands of freshly registered domains. His point: Gmail and other inbox providers reward steady, growing send volume, the reverse of an abuser's burst-and-vanish pattern.
Transcript
…you as a sender. So like what Gmail and all these players will want to see is like a graph that is consistently sending more and more versus what most people do, which is like you send once to a big audience and then you never send again. And then it's empty and then boom, you send it again.
Once a week, twice a week?
…Then you look at the website. Is it returning 200 or basic things like that? Some people don't even set that up. Or they do like a look-alike domain. So they're like, oh, maybe I'll do another domain for code outreach. That's terrible because it looks like you're phishing, right? Like because you're using a domain that looks like the same. So all these little things, and they just do, they send a lot of emails all at once and then they never send again. So you kind of got to reverse engineer how phishing works and build a platform that does exactly the opposite of that.
Do you have a list somewhere or do you recommend people go to some well-known lists?
Yeah, what I've learned is, again, another thing I didn't know, email is the type of world where it requires a lot of education, but people are not interested in learning, right? Like the platform should do all those things for them. So we added like insights inside the product so people can just…
But with plain text, there's no tracking, right? There's no embed the image. That's right. So you don't have open rates. Yeah. How do you know you have deliverability if you don't have open rates?
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