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BillionMail IP Warm-Up: A Simple 30-Day Plan for a New Mail Server

A brand-new mail server has no reputation. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo don't know whether your IP sends wanted newsletters or spam, so they're careful: they slow it down, put mail in spam, or refuse it. If you send 20,000 emails on day one, you'll almost certainly end up in spam, and that first impression is hard to undo.

Warming up means starting small and growing slowly, so the big providers see a pattern of wanted mail before they see volume.

Before you start
Warm-up doesn't help if the basics are broken. Check first:

• SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass and reverse DNS (PTR) matches your mail hostname. See BillionMail DNS setup.
  
• Your IP isn't on a blacklist. Test as in the deliverability guide.
  
• You have a clean, opt-in list. See importing contacts.
  
• You've registered your domain in Google Postmaster Tools and Microsoft SNDS, so you can see what they think of you.
  

The warm-up switch
When you create or edit a task in Email Marketing, the Associate IP Warmup System switch limits how fast it sends:


With it on, BillionMail spreads the campaign out instead of sending everything at once, and the task list shows its progress and estimated completion time. Leave it on for every campaign during the first weeks. It doesn't replace the plan below, but it stops one big send from undoing your work.

A simple 30-day plan
These are daily totals across all providers. They're a sensible starting point, not a law:

• Days 1 to 3: 50 to 100 a day. Send to your most engaged people first: those who opened or clicked recently, or customers.
  
• Days 4 to 7: 200 to 300 a day.
  
• Week 2: 500, then 1,000 a day.
  
• Week 3: 2,000 to 5,000 a day.
  
• Week 4: 5,000 to 10,000 a day, then keep growing by about 50% at a time.
  

The simplest way to do this in BillionMail: split your list into groups or tags ("wave 1", "wave 2" and so on, starting with the most engaged) and send one campaign per day to the next wave. Under Send time you can pick a date and time instead of Send now, so you can set up the whole week in advance.

Watch these signs every day

• Bounces above 2 to 3% or many "rate limited" / "try again later" (4xx) messages: stop growing and stay at the current level for a few days. See reading the queue delay reason.
  
• Gmail spam rate in Postmaster Tools above 0.1%: slow down and look at your content and list.
  
• Mail goes to spam at one provider only: keep sending small amounts to engaged people there; don't push volume.
  

If things go wrong, go back one step. It's normal for a warm-up to take six weeks instead of four.

After the warm-up

• Send regularly. An IP that sends nothing for a month and then 50,000 at once looks suspicious again.
  
• Keep the list clean. Remove hard bounces after every send and long-term non-openers every few months.
  
• Separate traffic if you can. Transactional mail (password resets) is precious. Some people send newsletters from a subdomain like
  Code:Copy

  news.example.com
  , so a newsletter problem doesn't block password resets. See adding a second sending domain.
  

Need mail to arrive during the warm-up?
Send the important stuff, like order emails, through a relay for the first weeks and warm up your own IP with newsletters. See SMTP relay with Amazon SES, Brevo or Mailgun.

More BillionMail guides

• Send API for transactional email
  
• WordPress email through BillionMail SMTP
  
• Import contacts, groups and tags
  
• Email templates explained
  
• SMTP relay with Amazon SES, Brevo or Mailgun
  
• Mailboxes and webmail
  
• Campaign analytics explained
  
• Move from Mailchimp or Sendy
  
• Add a second sending domain
  
• Send your first newsletter · DNS setup explained · Deliverability testing
  

Applies to BillionMail 4.9, October 2026. Replace

Code:Copy

example.com

and

Code:Copy

mail.example.com

with your own domain and mail hostname. Menu names can change a little between versions.