Writing cold emails with AI: a formatting guide

Using AI to scale cold email outreach is a real time saver. ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini can personalize messages at volume. But if you are not careful, your emails will read like "This is an automated AI message" and end up in the trash.

Here is how to format AI-generated cold emails so they actually get replies.

1. The "plain text" rule

The cold emails that get the best response rates look like they were quickly typed by a real person. Real people do not use complex nested lists, subheadings, and horizontal dividers in a quick email.

When AI drafts your email, it often tries to make it look like a brochure. Strip that out.

• Remove all ### heading symbols.
• Remove bolded keywords (unless you need one for a single metric).
• Make sure lists are simple, using standard text formatting instead of deep indentation.

2. Fixing the "URL problem"

AI assistants tend to generate links wrapped in markdown format: [Click here](https://example.com).

If you paste this directly into Gmail or Outlook without an editor catching it, the prospect sees the raw brackets and parentheses. It looks messy and damages trust.

The fix: extract the URLs so they sit naturally in the text. You can do this by hand, or run your draft through the AI Text Formatter, which tidies up messy links into clean, readable text automatically.

3. Sentence structure

AI writes long, evenly balanced paragraphs. Human salespeople write short, asymmetric sentences.

Break up your AI draft. No paragraph should be longer than two sentences. Hit the Return key often.

4. The punctuation tells: em dashes and smart quotes

By 2026, most people who read a lot of email can spot AI writing from the punctuation alone. Two tells dominate:

Em dashes. ChatGPT loves them — a typical AI draft uses one every couple of sentences — and almost nobody types them in a quick work email (there is no em dash key). A cold email with three em dashes reads as generated before the prospect has processed a single word. Our formatter's em-dash option replaces them with commas or hyphens, or removes them entirely, and reports how many it fixed.

Smart quotes. AI output uses typographic quotes ("curly") while quickly-typed human email uses straight ones. It is subtle, but it is exactly the kind of pattern spam filters and skeptical readers pick up on. The "Straighten quotes" toggle normalizes them in the same pass.

5. Hidden characters and deliverability

Formatting is not just cosmetic in email — it touches deliverability. Text copied from AI interfaces and Google Docs carries invisible Unicode characters (zero-width spaces, non-breaking spaces) and leftover HTML styling. Two problems follow:

• Spam scoring. Unusual character patterns and heavy inline styling are classic spam-filter inputs. A "plain text" email that secretly isn't one is worse than either a real plain-text email or a properly designed HTML one.
• Broken personalization. A zero-width space inside {{firstName}} breaks the merge tag in most outreach tools, and the prospect receives the raw placeholder. That email is dead on arrival.

Cleaning the draft before it goes into your sequencer removes both risks — the cleaner strips every hidden character automatically and shows you the count.

6. Gmail vs Outlook: the rendering gap

Your prospect's inbox decides what your email looks like, and the two big clients disagree:

• Gmail generally respects pasted styling — which means it faithfully renders the weird line-height and font your AI paste carried in. Your email looks subtly "off" next to every other message in the thread.
• Outlook (still the default across much of corporate B2B) is harsher: gray background blocks, doubled paragraph spacing, and mismatched fonts are the classic symptoms of pasting AI output directly.

The safe path is the same for both: clean, genuinely-plain text with your own client applying its default font. That is what a hand-typed email is, and hand-typed is the look you want.

A clean cold email skeleton

What good looks like after cleanup — short, asymmetric, and zero decoration:

Hi Sarah — saw [specific trigger].

We helped [similar company] cut [metric] by [number] in [timeframe]. One line on how.

Worth a 15-minute look next week?

[Name]

Four short paragraphs, one number, one question. No headings, no bullets, no bold except perhaps the single metric. If your AI draft has more structure than this, delete structure before you delete words.

Final checklist before sending:

1. Are there any stray ** or ## symbols? (Use the cleaner to strip them).
2. Any em dashes or curly quotes left? (The formatter's punctuation options fix both.)
3. Is the tone conversational, or does it sound like a press release?
4. Did the AI hallucinate a placeholder like [Insert Company Name Here]?
5. Paragraphs two sentences or shorter, with the ask stated once?

Spending 5 seconds cleaning up the formatting makes a noticeable difference in how authentic your AI-assisted emails look, and in how often people reply.