SendHustle’s Email Warmup System Is Shutting Down

I’m going to rip off the Band-Aid here: We’re shutting down the SendHustle email warmup system on January 31st, 2023. (NOT the SendHustle email platform itself, of course. Just the warmup system.)

As the most popular email warmup system on the internet, working with more than 80,000 email accounts at any given time, we know this is big — and jarring — news.

Here’s why we’re shutting down and our recommendations for you going forward.

• What!? Why Would You Shut Down Your Warmup Service?
• Isn’t There a Way You Could Run an Email Warmup System Without Gmail’s API?
• So What Email Warmup Service Should I Switch To?
• Um… So What Do We Do About Cold Email?
• You Won’t Need to Take Any Action As Warmup Ends

What!? Why Would You Shut Down Your Warmup Service?

There are three reasons we’re shutting down warmup.

First and foremost, we didn’t have a choice in the matter. Google has finally decided to clamp down on warmup.

We always suspected this day would come… and now it has. We’re surprised it took this long.

A couple of months ago, Google flat out told us to shut down our warmup system or we’d lose our Gmail API access.

They’ll soon make the same Godfather offer to the other warmup systems out there as well (if they haven’t already).

Second, we pride ourselves on offering valuable features and services that are unique and/or better than anyone else’s. We do that with cold email and email marketing. We couldn’t do that with email warmup.

There are lots of warmup services out there and there was nothing we could offer to make ours unique or better. (Other than making it free for anyone, even non-SendHustle users… which we did.)

And third, it’s always been difficult to keep the warmup system running properly. The thing gave us issues at the beginning and still gives us issues today.

Isn’t There a Way You Could Run an Email Warmup System Without Gmail’s API?

There is, in theory. We could switch from using the API to a clunkier IMAP method.

But… Google isn’t dumb. They’ll know if we’re offering an IMAP-based warmup service and, more important, if you’re using an IMAP-based warmup service.

They’ve made it clear they don’t want warmup taking place at all and that they now consider it a violation of their terms of service.

Again, we’re surprised it took them this long. After all, warmup systems put strain on their systems in service of fooling their systems.

So they’ll shut off any workarounds soon enough — and quite possibly hold it against you and us for persisting.

Um… So What Do We Do About Cold Email?

The end of email warmup is bad news, no doubt about it. Warmup was a useful deliverability shortcut for all of us in the cold email game.

The silver lining is: Email warmup wasn’t the “one true magic bullet” it’s sometimes made out to be.

Yes, it made a difference for cold emailers, no doubt about it. But the difference between great deliverability and so-so deliverability was never only warmup.

There are lots of other steps you can take to improve deliverability on your new accounts in a post-warmup world.

Gradually ramp up your own sending frequency

Send to smaller, targeted groups at first. Cold email is trending this direction anyway.

Then graduate to larger and larger sends. In other words, be your own warmup system.

Write high-quality, highly personalized emails

As Google gets to know you, they test your campaigns by sending some messages to recipients inbox and some to spam.

If the inbox cohort is opening, clicking, and replying, you’ll go to more inboxes next time. If the spam cohort is marking you as not spam, you’ll go to more inboxes next time.

That means better quality emails lead to better inbox placement.

As the saying goes, if you want to avoid going to spam, don’t send spam.

Use custom tracking domains

The biggest deliverability fix you can make is using a custom tracking domain in place of the default shared one.

All SendHustle plans include custom tracking domains and we’re one of the only platforms anywhere to offer free SSL to make those tracking domains secure. Here’s the process for setting one up.

Take other steps to improve deliverability

Try…

• Using embedded images rather than hosted ones.
• Squaring away any DKIM, SPF, and DMARC issues.
• Throttling your send speed.
• And trying plain text rather than HTML emails.

And run your campaigns through Spam Solver before you send to flag potential issues — then test potential fixes for those issues.

You Won’t Need to Take Any Action As Warmup Ends

You won’t need to take any steps on your end to turn off warmup. Your email accounts will simply stop sending and receiving warmup emails on our designated end date.

Again, we know this isn’t happy news. But we also know cold emailers are about as resilient, resourceful, and clever of a group as you’ll find.

And we’re looking forward to continuing to work with you to find the best, non-TOS-violating solutions for helping you send incredible cold emails.