Warm Up Domain

Learn how to warm up your domain to avoid deliverability issues

Warm Up Your Domain

Warming up your domain is a safety measure to help your emails reach inboxes reliably. Gradually increasing your sending volume builds a positive reputation with email clients and reduces the risk of deliverability issues.

Warming up a domain is a one-time process. Once you’ve built a good reputation, you can maintain higher sending volumes as long as you follow best practices.

Domains vs IP Addresses

Your sender reputation is based on (i) your domain and (ii) your IP address.

• Domain is tied to your brand and sending practices. It’s what email clients use to judge whether your emails are trustworthy.
• IP address is managed by Brew. We maintain high-quality shared IPs for all customers. For enterprise customers, we offer dedicated IP addresses upon request (see more below).

Show What is an IP address and why does it matter for email?

An IP address is a unique set of numbers that identifies a device or server on the internet. When you send an email, it travels from Brew’s sending server (with its own IP address) to your recipient’s email client. Think of the IP address as the return address on a letter—it tells the receiving system where the email came from.

In email marketing, your sending IP address influences inbox placement, but its importance has evolved. Historically, IP reputation was considered the primary factor in email deliverability. Today, dedicated IPs are not a silver bullet for reaching the inbox. Modern email clients like Gmail prioritize domain reputation, content quality, and recipient engagement over IP reputation alone.

There are two main types of IP addresses for sending email:

• Shared IP: Used by multiple senders. Brew carefully manages our shared IP pools to maintain excellent deliverability for most customers.
• Dedicated IP: Used only by your business. These require consistent, high-volume sending (30K+ emails monthly) with predictable patterns. They’re not recommended for lower volume or inconsistent senders. Available upon request for enterprise customers.

For most customers, Brew’s shared IP pools provide better deliverability by leveraging the established reputation of other quality senders, while our deliverability systems focus on the factors that matter most: engagement, content quality, and sending practices.

IP Protection Measures — Brew closely monitors email sending patterns, especially among new customers, to ensure no bad actors compromise our shared IP reputation. Our proactive monitoring systems help maintain the high deliverability rates that all customers benefit from, and we may temporarily limit sending capabilities if we detect unusual patterns that could harm IP reputation.

How to Warm Up Your Domain

1. Determine your starting point

   • New domain: If you’ve never sent emails from your domain, start with a low volume and ramp up gradually.
   • Existing domain with good sending history: If you’ve sent emails before and followed best practices, you can start at a higher volume, but still avoid sudden spikes.
   • Existing domain with poor sending history: We recommend switching to a new domain or subdomain and following the new domain warm-up process (no cold emails, ever).
2. Gradually ramp up

   Start with your most engaged contacts first—those who are likely to open, click, and interact with your emails. This helps build a positive reputation quickly. For a new domain, use this schedule:

   Day	Emails per day	Emails per hour
   1	Up to 150
   2	Up to 250
   3	Up to 400
   4	Up to 700	50 Maximum
   5	Up to 1,000	75 Maximum
   6	Up to 1,500	100 Maximum
   7	Up to 2,000	150 Maximum

   For an existing domain with good history, you can ramp up faster:

   Day	Emails per day	Emails per hour
   1	Up to 1,000	100 Maximum
   2	Up to 2,500	300 Maximum
   3	Up to 5,000	600 Maximum
   4	Up to 5,000	800 Maximum
   5	Up to 7,500	1,000 Maximum
   6	Up to 7,500	1,500 Maximum
   7	Up to 10,000	2,000 Maximum

   Adjust based on your audience size and engagement. If you see high bounce or spam rates, slow down and review your list quality.

3. Monitor engagement and deliverability

   As you gradually increase your sending volume, pay close attention to:

   • Open rates: Are recipients opening your emails?
   • Click rates: Are they engaging with your content?
   • Bounces: Are there any delivery failures?
   • Spam complaints: Is anyone marking your emails as spam?

   Monitor these metrics through your analytics dashboard. If you notice declining open rates or increasing bounces, slow down your volume increase until metrics improve.

   Improve reputation with self-engagement: Send a test email to yourself, open it, and reply to it. This action signals to email providers that your content is valuable and engaging, which can positively impact your sender reputation and deliverability.

4. Maintain best practices

   • Use double opt-in for all sign-ups to ensure your list is clean and engaged
   • Regularly remove bounces and unengaged contacts—see our Audience Hygiene guide
   • Keep your content valuable and relevant to maintain high engagement rates
   • Avoid spam trigger words and misleading subject lines

   Encourage replies to enhance reputation: Email clients view replies as a strong positive signal that your content is valuable. Brew’s AI will sometimes add questions or reply prompts to your emails (like “What do you think?” or “Any feedback?”) to encourage responses and help with your domain reputation. Make sure you monitor and respond to these replies to maintain the engagement loop.

Monitor Your Sender Reputation

As you warm up your domain, it’s essential to monitor how email providers and security services view your sending reputation. Unlike a credit score, there’s no single universal reputation score for email senders - different providers maintain their own systems.

These free tools provide valuable insights into your sending reputation across different platforms:

Google Postmaster Tools

What it provides: Domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rates, delivery errors, authentication success, and encryption status specifically for Gmail users

Why it matters: Gmail processes a significant portion of business emails but doesn’t always report spam complaints directly to email service providers

How to set up:

1. Go to gmail.com/postmaster and sign in with a Google account
2. Click the + button and enter your sending domain
3. Google will provide a TXT record to add to your domain’s DNS settings
4. Once verified, you’ll see data about your Gmail deliverability

Pro tip: It may take a few days for data to appear after verification as Google collects enough data about your sending patterns

Sender Score

What it provides: A reputation score (0-100) for your IP address based on a 30-day rolling average

Why it matters: Gives you a numerical benchmark to track improvements in your sending practices

How to access: Visit senderscore.org and enter your sending IP address

Pro tip: Check your score monthly and after any major changes to your email program

Barracuda Reputation System

What it provides: Reputation lookups for both IP addresses and domains with “good” or “poor” ratings

Why it matters: Barracuda is a major email security provider used by many businesses

How to access: Visit barracudacentral.org/lookups and enter your domain or IP

Pro tip: If you see a “poor” rating, check your authentication records and sending practices immediately

TrustedSource

What it provides: Detailed information on domain history, activation, and associations beyond basic reputation data

Why it matters: McAfee’s email filtering uses this data to determine whether to deliver your emails

How to access: Visit trustedsource.org and check your domain

Pro tip: Pay special attention to the domain associations section to ensure your domain isn’t linked to suspicious domains

Yahoo Sender Hub

What it provides: Delivery insights and complaint feedback for Yahoo and AOL email addresses

Why it matters: Yahoo/AOL represents a significant portion of consumer email addresses

How to access: Visit senders.yahooinc.com to sign up and monitor your performance

Pro tip: Focus on maintaining low complaint rates with Yahoo users as they tend to be more active with the “mark as spam” button

For best results, check these tools regularly throughout your domain warm-up process and whenever you make significant changes to your email volume or content strategy. Addressing potential reputation issues early prevents more serious deliverability problems later.

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