🌡️How to warm up a new IP

If you research IP warmup schedules, most of the "advice" is from outer space. 🛸

You'll notice these warmup pages and PDFs are commonly 10 years old or more and tell you that you'll be sending millions of messages in two weeks.

Think about how much has changed everywhere else in the last 10 years, how is it possible these documents could still be valid?

The next thing you'll notice about public IP warmup strategies is that when they deviate from a sketchy spreadsheet someone spitballed 12 years ago, the guides and recommendations are intentionally vague.

More often than not, they say almost nothing.

The reason why IP warmup guides are vague is because ESPs feel pressure from customers to make IP warmups happen as quickly as possible, but no one actually knows what 'as quickly as possible' is.

The reputation systems at mailbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud are opaque, black boxes relying on a combination of manual tuning, machine learning, and third-party software and data from anti-spam security vendors. Even the engineers responsible for maintaining these systems may not fully understand the results they produce.

Because of the dual pressures of having only a vague understanding of how these systems work and customer impatience, deliverability experts are mostly making it up as they go along: arbitrary judgment calls, doing more art than science, crossing their fingers, and generally relying on the world's most dangerous words: "in my experience...". 🤞

This is realistic advice from Microsoft, you should set your expectations for a six-week warmup schedule to start establishing a positive sender reputation:

This advice from Google is a warning, they will block your mail if you're a new sender who sends too much, too fast:

As Gmail is the primary domain of concern for email marketers, we'll use it for our example below and throughout the rest of this document.

An IP warmup works like compound interest:

You start out on day 1 sending a number of messages so small it seems both pointless and hopeless, a mere 54 days later, you'll be sending 300,000 messages per day.

A safe, reliable, and realistic warmup schedule is to start by sending a small number of emails on day one to only yourself, colleagues, friends, and family, somewhere between 5 and 20 messages to Gmail.

Make sure everyone opens the message.

Once you've reached 20 messages total sent in one day, the next day start increasing the number of messages sent by 20% per day.

Following a schedule of modest 20% daily increases, you'll see the magic of compounding in action:

Day 1	Day 7	Day 14	Day 30	Day 45	Day 54
20	66	194	4,180	64,600	300,000+

Sending over 300,000 messages per day for free - by starting at only 20 messages just last month!

With Velocity MTA you can create an automated warmup schedule that will enforce these daily limit increases, so you can't accidentally overshoot and blow up all your progress halfway through.

During a warmup, start by sending to only your most engaged contacts, only adding less engaged contacts when it becomes necessary to pad your sending volume so it still continues to grow every day.

Same-day responders, automated real-time triggers, and transactional email are best for getting started.

Gradually add contacts over time based on how recently they've opened or clicked a message: 0 days, 3 days, 7 days, 10 days, 14 days, 21 days, 30 days.

It might look something like this:

• Day 1

  • Yourself, colleagues, friends, family.

• Day 2-4

  • Same day openers and clickers.

• Day 5-7

  • Openers and clickers from the last 3 days.

• Day 7-10

  • Openers and clickers from the last 7 days.

• Day 10-15

  • Openers and clickers from the last 10 days.

• Day 15-21

  • Openers and clickers from the last 14 days.

• Day 21-30

  • Openers and clickers from the last 21 days.

• Day 30+

  • Openers and clickers from the last 30 days, 6 weeks, 60 days, 90 days.

Always pull openers OR clickers instead of only openers, 15%-20% of your clickers won't be in your openers segment because they didn't trigger an open pixel when they clicked.

Domain Reputation is half the battle

Gmail considers an IP and domain combination without any sending history between the two of them suspicious until proven otherwise. If you can use a domain with a positive reputation on a new IP address with 0 reputation, you'll get a head start.

In Emergency, Break Glass

If all else fails, and you're sending wanted mail that's being unfairly penalized by Gmail, you can try Google's Bulk Sender Escalation Form.