BobWork Email Warm-up — strategy

Why warm up at all

Gmail, Outlook and Zoho score a sender (mailbox + domain + sending IP) on history: how much it sends, whether people open and reply, and whether its mail gets marked spam or rescued from spam. A new mailbox has no history, so the first cold batch decides its reputation. Warm-up manufactures a good history first: steady, two-way, human-looking mail that lands in real inboxes and gets replies.

How the pool works

1. Your own private pool. Each mailbox you connect sends to your other mailboxes and reads what they send back. Accounts never mix: nobody else's inbox ever sees your addresses. Peers on a different domain and a different provider are picked twice as often, because cross-provider delivery is what gets scored. Connect at least two mailboxes.
2. Ramp per mailbox. Day 0 = 3 conversations, +2 every day, capped at 30 a day (settable per mailbox). Weekends run at 30%. This mirrors how a real new hire's mailbox grows.
3. Human rhythm. Sends are spread across 09:00–18:00 in the mailbox's own time zone (default Asia/Kuala_Lumpur), decided every 15 minutes with randomness, never in bursts. A pair never writes to each other twice within three hours.
4. Replies and threads. ~40% of received warm-up mail gets a reply; threads end after 3 messages. Replies are the strongest positive signal a provider sees.
5. Rescue → read → file. Anything that lands in Spam is moved to Inbox, marked read, and labelled Warm-up. After 24 h it is archived so real inboxes stay clean. Rescues are logged: the 7-day spam rate per mailbox is the health number to watch.
6. Content. 40 openers + 16 replies + 6 closers of plain office talk (meetings, drafts, lunch, handovers). No links, no prices, no urgency words, no HTML, first-name greetings and signatures. Plain text only.
7. Ready gate. A mailbox shows Ready for outbound after 14 days with a 7-day spam rate ≤ 3% and ≥ 30 warm-up mails received. For a brand-new domain plan 3–4 weeks. When cold outbound starts, keep warm-up running at a lower cap (10–15/day) and keep cold volume ≤ 30–50/day per mailbox.
8. Auto-throttle (manual today). If a mailbox's spam rate goes above 10%, pause it, check its domain's SPF/DKIM/DMARC, and restart the ramp from day 0 with a lower cap. The dashboard flags it; the engine does not change caps on its own yet.

Before day 1 — per domain

• SPF TXT on the apex including the provider (include:_spf.google.com, include:zohomail.com, Lark's include).
• DKIM published and enabled in the provider's admin (Google: google._domainkey; Zoho: zmail._domainkey).
• DMARC _dmarc TXT, p=none with rua= for the first month, then p=quarantine.
• The dashboard checks all three daily via DNS and shows which selector it found. Do not run a domain past ramp day 3 without all three.
• One mailbox per person-name, real display names, a profile photo on Google accounts, and a signature-free plain-text style.

What the connections can and cannot do

Rules

• Warm-up mail only ever goes to your own other mailboxes. The engine never reads, moves or replies to any other mail.
• Credentials are stored encrypted on BobWork's side only and are never shown in the app. Remove a mailbox and its access is dropped; Google access can also be revoked from your Google account.
• Every mailbox belongs to the account that connected it. You see only your own, and your mailboxes only warm each other.
• Warm up the domains you will actually send from. Keep your main company domain for real mail and give outreach its own domain.

Numbers to expect

Day 1–3: 3–7 mails/day per mailbox, a few rescues from spam are normal (that is the point). Day 7: ~15/day, spam rate should be under 10%. Day 14: 30/day, spam rate under 3% → ready. A 16-mailbox account at cap exchanges about 480 warm-up mails a day, all inside your own pool and well under per-mailbox provider limits.