Best Outbound Email Tools to Improve Outlook Deliverability and Real Engagement Rates

·Aug 06, 2026 03:52 PM·

Hello! Anyone got recommendations for sending tools besides smartlead? Been having a rough time lately, open rates sitting at like 85% which is obviously inflated by bot opens not real engagement, and on top of that outlook deliverability has been pretty bad too, most of our stuff is landing straight in spam. Before i spend more time trying to fix our current setup, curious what people here are actually using for outbound email and would recommend. Anyone dealt with outlook/microsoft deliverability specifically and found something that handles it better? Instantly, Apollo, Woodpecker...

8 comments

· Sorted by Oldest

Mihajlo M.
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I can personally recommend Instantly. It allows you to filter out reply rate of actual humans. But I run only gmail accounts so it may be different for outlook.
Wijdan T.
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have you tried Email Bison?
Mihajlo M.
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Yeah, I did. Personally found more success with Instantly than EmailBison. I can't say that EB is net worse than Instantly but for some clients I switched to Instantly because I wanted to see if performance would be better and it was. But on the other had, other clients performed as good on EB as on Instantly. So it's not conclusive. If you can afford it, I'd try both. EmailBison has an amazing API, much better than Instantly and also Instantly has the pesky contact limit which means that you have to figure out a system on how to clean leads from workspaces. I made a script I can run and will handle it for me but EmailBison doesn't limit you like that. Also I found Instnatly's UX more enjoyable and clients seem to agree with that as well. Hope it helped.
Wijdan T.
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I was talking about the microsoft and outlook account. I recommend instantly for g suite accounts as well
Mihajlo M.
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I don't use outlook accounts unfortunately
Amit S.
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I can share some new names that I have documented here: altdirectory.fyi/explore/alternatives-to-smartlead
David E.
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Thanks everyone, really appreciate all the recommendations and feedback! Super helpful to hear about your actual experiences with these tools. I'll definitely take a closer look at Instantly and EmailBison and probably run some tests before making any changes. Thanks again! 🙌
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Bharat D.
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Bison all the way! They really care about the quality.
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