When sending email directly from your WordPress installation your web server becomes your mail server.
To ensure that email servers perform optimally, it is essential to warm them up. In this article, we will explore the reasons why you need to warm up your mail server and how to do it effectively.
Why Warm Up a Mail Server?
Prevent Spam Filters
Spam filters are designed to protect users from spam, phishing, and other malicious content. However, when you send too many emails from a new mail server, you may trigger these filters, resulting in your emails being flagged as spam. To prevent this from happening, you need to warm up your mail server.
Warming up involves gradually increasing the volume of emails sent from the server over time, allowing email filters to recognize the server’s IP address as trustworthy.
Establish Reputation
Mail servers are rated based on their reputation. Email service providers (ESP) and email clients use reputation to determine whether to deliver your emails to recipients’ inboxes or spam folders.
A new mail server without any reputation will have a hard time getting its emails delivered to recipients’ inboxes. By warming up your mail server, you establish its reputation with ESPs and email clients, increasing the chances of your emails reaching the intended recipients’ inboxes.
Protect Your Domain Reputation
Your domain reputation is also important when it comes to email deliverability. If your emails are consistently marked as spam, it can negatively affect your domain reputation, resulting in other emails from your domain being flagged as spam.
Warming up your mail server can help protect your domain reputation by gradually introducing your emails to ESPs and email clients, ensuring that they are recognized as legitimate and trustworthy.
Avoid Blacklisting
When a mail server sends too many emails in a short period, it can trigger the recipient’s spam filters, resulting in the server’s IP address being blacklisted.
This means that future emails sent from the server will be blocked, resulting in a loss of business opportunities. By warming up your mail server, you reduce the risk of being blacklisted, ensuring that your emails are delivered promptly and accurately.
Improve Email Deliverability
Warming up your mail server can improve email deliverability by establishing a reputation with email clients, preventing email filters from blocking your emails, and protecting your domain reputation. This ensures that your emails reach the intended recipients’ inboxes, increasing the chances of them being read and acted upon.
How to Warm Up a Mail Server?
Start Slowly
To warm up your mail server effectively, you need to start slowly. Begin by sending a small volume of emails each day, gradually increasing the volume over time. The recommended volume increase is between 10% and 20% per day, depending on your mail server’s capacity and the number of emails you need to send.
Segment Your Email List
Segmenting your email list involves dividing it into smaller groups based on specific criteria, such as location, demographics, or engagement. This allows you to send targeted emails to each group, ensuring that they are relevant and engaging.
When warming up your mail server, segmenting your email list can help you manage the volume of emails sent each day, preventing you from overwhelming your mail server.
Use a Dedicated IP Address
Using a dedicated IP address for your mail server can help establish its reputation quickly. A dedicated IP address ensures that your emails are not affected by other mail servers sharing the same IP address.
This is quite a problem if your WordPress installation runs in a webhosting service. It then will share the same IP as all other websites sending email.
A dedicated IP means that your emails are not affected by other mail servers’ reputation, ensuring that they are delivered promptly and accurately.
How does Campation PostOffice™ do the warm up?
It’s simple: You activate Campation WarmUp™ and specify the period in days within which your server should be warmed up (e.g. 30 days) and the number of emails you plan to send monthly in the future (e.g. 30,000). An exponential formula is calculated from both values, which only allows 2% of the daily average planned emails (here 1,000) to be sent on the 1st day, on the 2nd day only 5% and on the last day 100% of the planned quantity.
Then generate your emails as you see fit from your WordPress, regardless of the number – for example 500 emails. You should preferably choose a recipient group that you know will open your emails, because ESPs measure the interaction that your emails trigger. It is an important factor in building the reputation of your mail server!
The generated 500 emails end up in the Campation PostOffice™ outbox queue, from where they are usually sent immediately to the recipients.
The activated Campation WarmUp™ now ensures that the outflow of all emails into the Internet is automatically controlled according to the rules of the warm-up, i.e. that on the 1st day only 2% of the planned 1,000 emails/day (= 20) emails are sent on 2nd day 5% (= 50), on the 3rd day 9% (= 90) etc., so that your 500 generated emails are only completely sent to the recipient after about 6 days.
Irrespective of this, all transactional emails (opt-in, invoices, etc.) are sent immediately and are not subject to the warm-up rules.
If your WordPress installation runs in a web hosting, you can install the additional plugin Campation RemoteMail™ on a small cloud server (costs $5-7/month) and connect it to the master Campation PostOffice™. Such a small cloud server has (like every server) a dedicated IP address. Its reputation cannot be damaged by other websites.