Warmup
Warmup is Communication
During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas—he’s the controller—and they wait for the airplanes to land. They’re doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn’t work. No airplanes land. — Richard Feynman
Read MoreHow long does it take to change reputation at Gmail?
Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4 weeks to see any direct progress.
This is a screenshot of IP reputation on Google Postmaster Tools. The sender made some significant changes in mail sending on some of their IP addresses starting in mid to late December. You can see, that the tools noticed and the reputation of those IPs bad to good fairly rapidly. It took a few more weeks of consistent sending for those two IPs to switch to yellow. And it took around another month for the reputation to flip to high.
Because this company is doing all the right things, and they’re seeing (as they describe it) some small amounts of improvement, I told them to give it another couple weeks. If they weren’t happy with their progress I could help them. But, frankly, until we can tell if this is something other than a normal warmup there isn’t much else to do.
When I got off the phone I felt very much like a doctor telling a patient to take two aspirin and call me in the morning. But, honestly, sometimes that is the right answer. Give it time.
Warmup advice for Gmail
Getting to the Gmail inbox in concept is simple: send mail people want to receive. For a well established mail program with warm IPs and domains, getting to the inbox in practice is simple. Gmail uses recipient interaction with email to determine if an email is wanted or not. These interactions are easy when mail is delivered to the inbox, even if the user has tabs enabled.
When mail is in the bulk folder, even if it’s wanted, users are less likely to interact with the mail. Senders trying to change their reputation to get back to the inbox face an uphill battle. This doesn’t mean it’s impossible to get out of the bulk folder at Gmail, it’s absolutely possible. I have many clients who followed my advice and did it. Some of these clients were simply warming up new IPs and domains and needed to establish a reputation. Others were trying to repair a reputation. In both cases, the fixes are similar.
When I asked colleagues how they handled warmup at Gmail their answers were surprisingly similar to one another. They’re also very consistent with what I’ve seen work for clients.
Fun with new mailservers
I’m building a new set of mailservers for wordtothewise.com – our existing mailserver was “I’ll repurpose this test box for a week” about four years ago, so it’s long past time.
I tested our new smarthost by sending a test mail to gmail. This is the very first email this IP address has sent in at least three or four years, possibly forever:
Why do we "warmup" IP addresses
IP address warmup is a big issue for anyone moving to a new IP address for sending.
I’m constantly being asked how to warm up an IP. My answer is always the same. There’s no right way to warm up an IP nor is there a specific formula that everyone should follow.
What warming up is about is introducing mail traffic to receiving spam filters in a way that lets the filter know this is a legitimate email stream. This means sending small but regular amounts of mail that recipients interact with. As the filters adjust to the amount of mail from that IP, more mail can be sent over that IP. Increase the mail volume over the next few weeks until the desired volume is reached.
There are a couple things to remember about warming up.