Warming up Servers

Transpond is a fully managed email marketing platform, which means that we look after a lot of email servers on your behalf.

What this boils down to is that when you send your next marketing campaign, automation or transactional email through Transpond, a team of experts are checking the servers they are being sent through to ensure there are no issues with things like blacklists or blocks.

When we introduce a new mail server into our sending network, we could just add it to our server rotation, and have it start sending tens of thousands of emails straight away.

The problem with this is the outside world, email servers and email providers like Hotmail, Gmail and Yahoo Mail have never seen this server before, and all of a sudden it's sending lots and lots of emails out with absolutely no history or reputation.

So what happens? At first, everyone blocks the IP address and as a result barely any emails make it to your contacts's inboxes. If the IP isn't blocked, many hosts will simply set a limit on the number of emails they will allow the new server to send them.

The solution is to gently let the outside world know that a server is "OK", it's not going to cause lots of issues, it isn't setup to send lots of spam, and it has genuine people sending emails to genuine subscribers.

This "gentle" approach is known as "Warming Up" and it works by limiting the number of emails a server can send each day, starting very low, and gradually building up the number as the days go by.

This gives other mail servers and mail services a chance to see that the mail server is not going to cause issues, and is building up a good reputation, and if they have set a sending limit, that limit will also be raised as the server proves its worth.

How we Warm Up

There's no hard and fast rule as to how fast or slowly you should warm up a new server, but over time we have experimented and found the following warmup rules work pretty well.

How does this affect me?

Most of our customer never need to know, or worry about warming up. Transpond warms up a server automatically in the background whenever we add a new one to a pool, and we share the email load between new servers, and established servers to avoid any noticeable slow down.

However, some customers do use their own dedicated mailing servers. If you do have your own dedicated mail servers with Transpond just remember that we are automatically warming up your servers from the moment they are added to your account, so take note of the email rates because you might find campaigns take a little while to send for the first few days.