Warm up a new sending domain without burning it

A schedule for ramping email volume on a fresh domain so mailbox providers learn to trust it before real traffic arrives — configuration and patience, not tooling.

When to run it

You're standing up lifecycle email on a new domain or subdomain — a client launch, a migration off a shared IP, a mail. subdomain to isolate marketing from transactional. Mailbox providers have no history for the domain, and no history is treated as suspicion: full volume on day one is the classic self-inflicted deliverability wound, and recovering a burned domain takes far longer than warming one.

Why it works

Inbox providers score senders on the pattern of their history: volume growth, bounce rate, complaint rate, and whether recipients engage. A ramp that starts small and grows steadily is the good-sender pattern. Sending the early, small batches to your most-engaged recipients stacks the deck — their opens and clicks are the positive signals that compound into reputation, which is why warmup order matters as much as warmup volume.

The play

1. Do the table stakes first: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on the new domain, and a matching tracking domain so links resolve through it too.
2. Segment by engagement — recipients who opened or clicked recently go first. Hogsend's first-party open/click tracking means you already have this data on your own sends.
3. Ramp on a schedule: start in the low dozens per day, roughly double every few days, and hold volume flat for a day whenever bounces or complaints tick up.
4. Suppress hard bounces immediately — a warming domain has no reputation cushion to absorb them.
5. Only route real campaign volume once the ramp completes clean.

Ship it with Hogsend

Broadcast waves split a send into scheduled slices, so the ramp is configuration instead of a spreadsheet and a calendar. The engagement segment comes from your own send history.

// A warmup wave plan: the same broadcast, released in slices.
// Each wave goes to the next tranche of the engaged-first segment.
const warmupWaves = [
  { day: 1, recipients: 50 },
  { day: 3, recipients: 100 },
  { day: 6, recipients: 250 },
  { day: 9, recipients: 500 },
  { day: 13, recipients: 1_000 },
  { day: 18, recipients: 2_500 },
  // hold or step back a wave if bounces/complaints rise
];

Bounces and complaints flow back through the provider webhook (email.bounced / email.complained) and suppress automatically — campaigns and broadcasts covers waves and the delivery events end to end.

How you'll know

Bounce rate and complaint rate per wave — bounces under a couple of percent and complaints well under one in a thousand are the widely published thresholds providers punish past. The engine's email.delivered and email.opened events give you per-wave delivery and engagement without leaving Hogsend; if a wave degrades, hold the ramp rather than push through it.