Warming up a domain
Every newly verified sending identity starts on a 30-day ramp, so it builds a reputation before it needs one
A brand-new sending domain has no reputation. The first thing Gmail, Outlook and the rest learn about it is the volume it opens with, and the pattern they are most confident about is the one that looks like this: nothing, then thousands, from a domain nobody has ever seen.
So Sendly starts every newly verified identity on a warm-up: a daily ceiling that begins small and rises every day for 30 days. It is not a plan you follow by hand. The send path enforces it, per identity, per UTC day.
The ramp
| Day | Emails that identity may send |
|---|---|
| Day 1 | 50 |
| Day 2 | 100 |
| Day 3 | 200 |
| Day 7 | 1,000 |
| Day 14 | 7,500 |
| Day 21 | 25,000 |
| Day 30 | 50,000 |
The days in between step up gradually. After day 30 the identity graduates and carries no warm-up ceiling at all.
These are ceilings, not targets. Sending less than the day's number is normal and costs you nothing — what the mailbox providers react badly to is a sharp day-over-day increase, which a ceiling can prevent and a target cannot.
A warm-up is one of three limits on a send, not a replacement for them. Your project's daily cap and your account's sending rate still apply, and the smallest of the three is the one you will hit. That is why the panel tells you which one is holding you: if your account's rate is lower than the ramp asks for on a given day, raising the ramp would change nothing.
Where to see it
Settings → Domains, on the identity itself. It shows the day you are on, today's ceiling, how much of it you have used, and which of the two limits produced the number.
A send past the day's ceiling fails with a message naming the identity and the day. It is not retried: the ceiling is a daily one, so the send would fail again on every attempt until tomorrow. Send the rest of that batch the next day.
Ending a warm-up early
If the domain already sends from another provider, it already has a reputation, and opening it at 50 a day is a regression rather than a protection. End warm-up on the domain lifts the ceiling immediately.
Do that only when it is true. A domain that has never sent, released straight to full volume, is exactly the pattern the ramp exists to prevent, and the damage — a reputation formed on a bad first week — takes far longer to undo than the 30 days you saved.
Starting one again
Start from day one puts an identity back at the beginning of the ramp. Two situations call for it:
- The identity has gone quiet for months. Reputation decays, and resuming at volume reads the same to a mailbox provider as starting from nothing.
- The identity's reputation took damage — a bad list, a spike in complaints — and you are rebuilding it deliberately.
Restarting does not clear what you have already sent today. Those messages happened, and handing back the day's headroom would begin the restart with a burst.
Identities added before warm-ups existed
They are not enrolled, and nothing changed for them. A warm-up starts when a domain verifies, so only identities verified from here on begin one automatically. An older identity can be put on a ramp with Start from day one if you want it there.