Letting a Contractor or Outside SDR Email Leads From Your Domain: A Safe Setup

When a contractor starts emailing leads for you, give them their own mailbox (ideally on a separate outreach domain), send only to lists you've verified, and plan how you'll remove access before day one. Don't share a founder's login, and don't put cold outreach in a shared sales@ inbox on the domain your customers use. That keeps their mistakes off your main domain and makes it a two-minute job to cut access later.

An r/smallbusiness thread asked how to set this up: the company used Google Workspace with founder addresses that clients already knew, and planned a collaborative sales@ inbox so contractors could be added and removed. That works for inbound mail. It's a risk for outbound.

The setup we'd use

Need	Use	Avoid
Contractor sends outreach	Their own named user on a separate outreach domain	A shared founder password
Contractor handles inbound leads	A Google Groups Collaborative Inbox on the main domain	Forwarding everything to their personal address
Owner sees all replies	Reply-to or forwarding into a shared label or CRM	Replies that only exist in the contractor's inbox
Removing access	Suspend the user, transfer mail	Changing a shared password and hoping

Their own mailbox, on a separate domain

A named user per contractor means you can see what each person sent and switch off one person without affecting anyone else. Put it on a domain that's clearly yours but isn't your main one, set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and check it with the email domain health checker. The cold email domain generator suggests available names. Our post on whether you need a separate domain covers when the main domain is acceptable.

Delegation and collaborative inboxes

Google's delegation help says a delegate can "read, send, and delete emails in your account for you", their own address appears on mail they send, and in a work account you "can only add people or groups within that organization." So delegation only works once the contractor already has a user in your Workspace, and it gives them access to everything in the delegated mailbox.

A Google Groups Collaborative Inbox lets members take and assign conversations sent to a group address. It suits inbound sales@ mail. Cold outreach sent as that group address still comes from your main domain.

Control the list

Most contractor problems start with the list. Agree in writing:

1. You supply or approve every list. No lists the contractor brings from a previous client.
2. Dedupe against customers and past opt-outs with compare email lists, so nobody gets cold-pitched who's already a customer or said no.
3. Verify before every send on the verify page. Send the valid file, hold risky rows back.
4. Agree volume limits per inbox and a bounce rate at which they stop and tell you.
5. Share the suppression list and make adding to it part of the job. Our cold email suppression list guide covers what goes in it.

The day they leave

Suspend or delete their user, transfer their mailbox to an owner so replies aren't lost, remove them from groups and sending tools, and rotate any API keys or passwords they had. Keep their domain and mailbox running a few weeks so late replies still arrive.

What SimpleVerifier costs

The first 100 checks are free with a Google sign-in. Pro is $39 a month with the first 100,000 checks a month at full speed, then slower, never cut off, and one-time packs of 10,000 checks for $15 never expire. See pricing.