Sending mailbox best practices

How you set up the mailboxes a campaign sends from decides how much of your email reaches the inbox. Do it before you connect them to Victoria AI.

Don't send cold email from your day-to-day mailbox

Don't connect the personal or company mailbox you use for everyday work. Cold email carries more risk than normal email: some recipients mark it as spam, and mailbox providers judge the whole domain by those reports. If your main domain's reputation drops, your invoices, support replies and team email can start landing in spam too.

Keep everyday email and outreach apart: outreach goes from dedicated mailboxes on a dedicated sending domain.

Use a dedicated sending domain

Register a second domain close to your brand, such as getacme.com or acmehq.com for Acme, and use it only for outreach:

• Point the domain's website at your main site, so anyone who visits lands somewhere real.
• Create mailboxes on it with Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, under real names, such as jordan@getacme.com. Victoria AI connects Gmail and Outlook mailboxes; see Connect a Gmail or Outlook mailbox.
• Don't use a free address such as @gmail.com. It can't carry your own DNS records, and the DNS check flags it as a personal mailbox domain.

Each connected mailbox uses one mailbox on your plan. Workspace includes 3. See Plans and add-ons.

Warm up new mailboxes with a warm-up service

A new mailbox has no sending history, and providers are wary of one that suddenly sends to strangers. A warm-up service builds that history by exchanging email with other mailboxes in its network and marking it as wanted.

Victoria AI doesn't warm up mailboxes. It has no warm-up network. What it does is ramp volume: for its first 14 days, a newly connected mailbox sends a small daily number that rises over time, then its normal limits apply. See Email sending limits and the warm-up ramp.

So use a third-party warm-up service for each new sending mailbox:

• Start it before the mailbox sends any campaign email. Two to four weeks of warm-up is common.
• Keep it running while the mailbox sends campaigns.
• Victoria's ramp and caps count only the emails Victoria sends, not the warm-up service's.

Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the sending domain

The sending domain needs all three records before mailbox providers trust it. Victoria AI checks them for every connected mailbox, every day, and won't activate a campaign whose sending domain fails. Once SPF and DKIM pass, move DMARC from p=none to p=quarantine. See DNS setup for the exact records for Google and Microsoft.

Keep each sending mailbox's volume modest

Spread volume across mailboxes rather than pushing one hard:

• Each mailbox sends at most 500 emails a week, and each campaign sends up to its Emails daily limit per mailbox, 30 by default.
• To send more, add mailboxes rather than raising one mailbox's limits.
• Don't select Skip ramp on a new mailbox. New mailboxes that send at full volume straight away are far more likely to be rate-limited.
• Use verified emails. A mailbox whose recent emails bounce too often has its sequence emails paused until the rate drops.

Sending mailbox setup checklist

1. Register a dedicated sending domain and point it at your main website.
2. Create Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes on it, under real names.
3. Add SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the domain. See DNS setup.
4. Start a third-party warm-up service on each mailbox.
5. Connect each mailbox on Sender Accounts and check its chip reads DNS ok.
6. Let the ramp run, and assign the mailboxes to a campaign in Settings → Connected Accounts.

For how this affects copy and reply rates, see Cold email principles.