Why a New Domain Should Send Email Slowly

You don’t need to become an email expert to run Benecaster. But there’s one thing worth knowing before you send to a large list for the first time, because a bad first send is hard to undo.

The Short Version

Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail and the rest decide whether to deliver your email to the inbox, the spam folder, or nowhere. A big part of that decision is your domain’s history. A domain with a steady record of sending mail that people open is trusted. A domain that has barely sent anything, and then suddenly sends hundreds or thousands of messages in a day, looks just like a hacked account or a spammer.

This is called your sending reputation. It belongs to your domain, not to Benecaster, and once it’s damaged it takes weeks of careful sending to repair. In the meantime, your welcome emails, feed links and episode notices land in spam or don’t arrive at all.

When This Applies to You

It matters most when two things are true at once:

• Your domain hasn’t sent much email before. A new site, or a domain you’ve only ever used for a website.
• You’re about to email a lot of people at once. Moving your supporters over from Patreon or Supercast is the most common case: every one of them is due a welcome email at the same moment.

If your site already sends regularly through an email service, you’re probably fine. If you’re on a fresh domain and about to migrate a few hundred people, read on.

What Helps Most

1. Send through a transactional email service. This is the biggest single improvement, and at podcast-list sizes it usually costs little. Services like Postmark, Mailgun, SendGrid and Amazon SES send from mail servers that already have a good reputation, and they walk you through the domain setup below as part of signing up. Without one, WordPress sends through your web host’s mail server, which is often shared with other sites and frequently distrusted already. SMTP Setup and Configuration shows how to connect one.

2. Let your domain prove who it is. Two DNS records, called SPF and DMARC, tell receiving mail servers that your mail really comes from you. You don’t need to understand how they work. Your email service tells you exactly which records to add, and your domain registrar or host can add them for you if you’d rather not.

3. Give a large send time. Benecaster paces a new address for you (see below), so you don’t need to change any settings. What you still control is timing. Start a migration a few days before you need everyone to have their welcome email, and check Benecaster → Settings → Email, which shows how many emails your address may send today.

What Benecaster Does for You

Benecaster warms up each sending address automatically. While your From domain has little recent sending history, Benecaster limits how many emails it sends in a day, and raises that limit each day it sends. The warm-up is there to protect your domain. Sending more slowly than you asked for is deliberate: the damage from a sudden large send would land on your domain, not on Benecaster’s, and it would outlast the send.

• Through your web host: 50 emails on the first sending day, then 100, 200, 400, 800 and 1,600, doubling each sending day. After that, 2,400 a day is the most your host mail sends, whatever Emails per hour is set to. About 900 emails take around 5 days, and 3,000 take around 6.
• With an email service connected: 500 on the first sending day, doubling each sending day until it reaches your Emails per hour rate. About 900 emails take around 2 days, and 3,000 around 3.

Only days that actually send count, so a quiet week doesn’t move the warm-up along.

Settings → Email → Sending Warm-up shows today’s limit for your address. If you’re sending through your web host, it also says so and recommends connecting an email service. Installing any SMTP or email-service plugin is enough for Benecaster to notice. With a service connected, the same section offers Send at the full rate now, skipping the warm-up. Use it only if the address already sends plenty of email and you know its reputation is good. There’s no way to skip the warm-up on plain host mail.

An address that goes quiet is eased back in. If your address sends no email at all for 30 days or more, mailbox providers start to treat it much like a new one, so Benecaster does too. It doesn’t start over. On host mail it resumes at 800 a day and is back to full speed on its third sending day. With an email service it resumes at about 2,000 a day at the default rate, also back to full on the third day. Anything sent within 30 days keeps the address warm, so a quiet week or a fortnight’s holiday costs nothing. You’re most likely to notice this at the start of a new season.

Everything goes through a paced queue, described in Why Are My Episode Emails Sending Slowly?. Feed URL reset emails, password resets, security alerts and anything sent to a site admin skip the queue and the warm-up, and arrive within seconds. There are only ever a handful of those.

What Benecaster Can’t See

The warm-up learns only from your site’s own sending history and email setup. Benecaster knows whether an email left your site. It doesn’t know whether Gmail put it in the inbox or the spam folder, because that information goes to the mail server that sent it, not back to WordPress. An email service gives you that visibility: its dashboard shows deliveries, bounces and spam complaints. That’s one more reason to use one.