Rudraksa Dhar- Never send cold email from your main domain. Buy separate domains that redirect to your site.
- Three mailboxes per domain, split across Google Workspace and Microsoft 365.
- Warm up for three weeks, test with 50 to 100 leads, then scale.
Why your main domain never sends cold email
Your main domain carries your invoices, your support replies and your CEO's email. If cold email hurts its reputation, all of that starts landing in spam. It's not worth the risk at any volume.
So we buy separate domains that look like yours and redirect to your website. If a buyer types one in, they land on your site. If one domain has a bad week, the rest of your sending, and your main domain, carry on.
Buying the domains
For a company at acme.com, we'd buy names like tryacme.com, acmehq.com or getacme.co. Short, clearly yours, nothing that looks like a trick.
How many depends on the volume you need. Our Pro setup runs 15 domains and 45 mailboxes. Ultimate runs 20 domains and 60 mailboxes. The domains and mailboxes are set up in your name and stay with you.
Mailboxes and providers
We create three mailboxes per domain, in the names of real people on your team, with a photo and a proper signature. Three is the ratio that lets us send meaningful volume without any single inbox doing too much.
We split the mailboxes across Google Workspace and Microsoft 365. Buyers' inboxes run on both, and having both on our side means one provider's bad day doesn't stop the campaign.
The DNS records that matter
Every sending domain gets these before warm-up starts:
| Record | What it does |
|---|---|
| SPF | Lists the servers allowed to send for the domain |
| DKIM | Signs every email so the receiver can check it wasn't changed |
| DMARC | Tells inbox providers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM, and sends you reports |
| MX | Lets the mailbox receive replies |
| Tracking domain | A custom CNAME, so link tracking doesn't share a reputation with other senders |
We test each mailbox with a spam checker and want a score of 9 out of 10 or better before it sends anything real.
Warm-up: two weeks in theory, three in practice
New mailboxes have no reputation. Warm-up builds one by sending and receiving small volumes of normal-looking email for a few weeks, so Google and Microsoft learn to trust them. Done properly, it pays off in inbox delivery for the six to ten months that follow.
The order of work in week one is fixed: the account first, then the domains, then the mailboxes, which takes a day or two. Warm-up starts at the end of the week and runs for three. Lists, signals and copy get built in parallel, so nothing waits on the warm-up.
ankit@tryhelio.co
ankit@gethelio.coma.rao@heliohq.comankit.r@helio-ai.coLaunch small, then scale
We never switch a new setup on at full volume. The first send goes to a test batch of 50 to 100 leads. We check where it lands, then scale after two or three days if placement looks right.
Two rules hold from then on. Every list is verified, and we send only to the safe tier. And volume is spread across all the mailboxes, so no single inbox sends enough to stand out, while every reply lands in one place.
What breaks it
Most deliverability problems come from three places: unverified lists, one inbox sending too much, and DNS records that someone changed without knowing what they did.
That last one catches people during website migrations. When you move your site, change only the web records, the A and CNAME entries. Never touch MX, SPF, DKIM or DMARC unless you mean to.
Sometimes the problem is on the receiving side. We once saw our emails land in spam for a single client's own team because their mail server flagged an SPF issue. Their IT whitelisted the domains and it cleared the same day.
The checklist
- Separate domains, redirecting to your site
- Three mailboxes per domain, real names and photos
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC on every domain, plus a custom tracking domain
- Spam test at 9 out of 10 or better
- Three weeks of warm-up
- Every list verified, safe tier only
- A test batch of 50 to 100, then scale
