Why this site exists

A note from David

I build a lot of products: a couple of larger ones and a steady stream of smaller tools that come out of the same team. Every one of them has the same problem on day one: nobody knows it exists. Building is the easy half. Exposure is the half that decides whether the thing lives.

Email is the channel you actually own

Ads get more expensive every quarter. Social reach belongs to the platform. Marketplaces take their cut and their rules. Email is the one channel where you own the list, the message and the timing, and a well-written email to the right person still starts more real conversations than anything else I have tried.

So for every product we launch, part of the plan is outreach by email: a new domain, a few mailboxes with real names, a short sequence to people who should care.

And then it all lands in spam

Here is what nobody tells you the first time. A new domain has no reputation. A new mailbox has no history. Gmail and Outlook look at that blank slate, see twenty identical-looking emails leave it in an hour, and quietly route everything to Spam. Not bounced, not rejected, just unread. You can have the best product and the sharpest copy, and the first two weeks of outreach from a fresh domain are mostly wasted.

I learned this the expensive way, more than once. Fresh domain for a launch, three mailboxes, a careful list, and a reply rate of zero because the mail never reached an inbox.

What the fix looks like, and what it costs

The fix is well known: warm the mailboxes up first. Send a small, growing amount of ordinary email that gets opened, replied to and pulled out of Spam, every day for about two weeks, so the mailbox has a history before the campaign starts. Then keep it running underneath the campaign.

The paid tools do this. They also charge per mailbox, per month, forever. For a team running sixteen mailboxes across several products that adds up fast, and the pricing punishes exactly the thing you need, which is more mailboxes sending less each. Most of them also put your mailboxes in a shared pool with strangers, so your business addresses end up in inboxes you have never heard of, and the "health score" they show is a number with no measurement behind it.

So we built our own

We needed warm-up for our own mailboxes anyway, so we built the engine: a private pool per account, a 14-day ramp from 3 emails to 30, business hours in each mailbox's time zone, replies inside threads, spam rescue, and a spam rate measured in our own inboxes rather than guessed. Gmail, Google Workspace, Zoho and Lark, because that is what we use. It worked. Our mailboxes were ready in two weeks and the next launch's outreach landed.

Once it was running, keeping it to ourselves made no sense. The marginal cost of another account warming its own mailboxes is close to nothing, and every small team doing outreach has the same problem we had.

Why it is free

Because warm-up is not the product. It is the thing you have to do before the product gets a fair hearing, and charging for it per mailbox felt like charging for the stairs. The site runs on infrastructure we already pay for. If it ever costs real money to run at scale, we will say so here first.

What we ask in return is nothing. If it saved your launch, tell someone who is about to register a new domain.

What it is not

It is not a sending tool, a list builder or a magic wand. It builds reputation. It cannot fix a missing SPF record, a bought list or a spammy sequence, and it will not make a bad product interesting. It gets your mail into the inbox so the rest of your work gets judged on its merits. That is all we wanted for ours.

Where it goes next

More providers, provider-specific guides, and the things we learn from our own launches written up on the blog. The engine's exact behaviour is public on the strategy page, and the first-time guide on what to expect exists because the first thing every new user asks is why their mailboxes are emailing each other.

If you are building something and need it seen, start with the mailboxes. Warm them up here, free.

David