Choose your situation
Buying domains and mailboxes for cold email
The right structure is always the same: several domain names close to your own, redirected to your real website, with two or three named mailboxes on each.
It is the norm in outreach
Whatever the tool, nobody sends outreach campaigns from their company domain. You buy a few dedicated domains, create mailboxes on them, warm them up, and your campaigns leave from there.
The reason is simple: spam complaints pile up on the domain name. If an outreach domain gets damaged, you replace it for the price of a domain. Your main domain keeps carrying your website, quotes, invoices and customer conversations. More on this in can you prospect from your main domain.
Emelia's own example
Our main domain is emelia.io: it is the domain of our website, our app and our conversations with customers. For outreach, we bought variants such as tryemelia.com or get-emelia.com. They all redirect to emelia.io, and prospects recognize the brand at a glance.
On the same model, here are the kinds of variants you can come up with for a domain:
| Kind of variant | Ideas for emelia.io |
|---|---|
| A prefix | tryemelia.com, getemelia.com, hello-emelia.com, team-emelia.com |
| A suffix | emelia-app.com, emeliahq.com, emelia-team.com |
| Another extension | emelia.co, emelia.net, emelia.fr |
Keep your brand readable: recipients read the sender address before the subject line. Avoid strings of digits and long chains of hyphens, which look like spam. Stick to ordinary extensions (.com, .net, .co, .io): an exotic one looks dubious and often costs more at renewal.
How many domains and mailboxes?
It all starts from the volume you are aiming for. A well warmed-up mailbox sends at most 35 new contacts and 100 emails a day, follow-ups included. If you keep warmup running during campaigns, which we recommend, count 25 new contacts and 75 emails instead. With 3 mailboxes per domain, which is what we recommend, that gives these orders of magnitude:
| New contacts per day | Mailboxes (25 a day each) | Domains (3 mailboxes each) |
|---|---|---|
| 25 | 1 | 1 |
| 75 | 3 | 1 |
| 150 | 6 | 2 |
| 300 | 12 | 4 |
| 500 | 20 | 7 |
These are ceilings, not targets. If your sequence has many follow-ups, the 75 or 100 emails a day limit is the one you will hit first. Also check your plan: Start lets you connect 3 mailboxes, Grow 50.
Spam complaints pile up on the domain, not on the mailbox. Stacking 20 addresses on a single domain name concentrates all the risk in one place. To scale up volume, you add domains, not mailboxes.
What to set up on each domain
Buying the domain is not enough. Four settings are done once per domain, at the domain's host:
- The mailboxes: named addresses, with the person's real name as the display name.
- Authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC in the DNS zone. They prove to mail providers that your emails really come from you. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC.
- The tracking domain: a CNAME record that routes your links through your own domain rather than a shared one. See the tracking domain.
- The redirect: the domain points to your real website with a permanent (301) redirect. A curious prospect who types the address must land on your site, not on an error page or the host's default page.
Outreach is sent from named addresses. firstname@yourdomain.com looks like a person writing to a person. contact@, info@ or sales@ look like bulk mail, and some filters treat them that way. Take care of the display name too: a real first and last name, properly capitalized.
Where to buy your domains and mailboxes
Two ways to go, depending on your volume and how much time you want to spend on it:
- Do it yourself. Buy the domains from any registrar, create the mailboxes on Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, and set up the DNS records. Then connect them to Emelia.
- Directly in Emelia, very soon. You pick your domains and addresses, and the Google Workspace mailboxes arrive connected to your account, for $5 per mailbox per month.
What is your situation?
Frequently asked questions
The questions we get asked on this topic, answered briefly.
Does the secondary domain need a website?
No. A redirect to your main website is enough, and having no site does not stop you from sending. Just make sure the domain does not show the host's default page or an error: a prospect who checks the address should land on your real website.
Isn't a subdomain, like outreach.mysite.com, enough?
No. A subdomain stays tied to your main domain: it does not shield it from complaints, and it complicates the mail server (MX) setup. Buy real domains, they cost little per year.
How much does a domain name cost?
It depends on the registrar and the extension: ordinary extensions are cheap, often discounted the first year. Always check the renewal price, that is where the gaps widen, especially on exotic extensions.
Should my outreach mailboxes live in my company's Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 account?
They do not have to, and we actually recommend the opposite: a separate Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 tenant for outreach, with its own domains. A deliverability incident stays contained there, without touching the company's email.
Can I buy mailboxes that are already warmed up?
Emelia does not sell any: even mailboxes bought in Emelia will arrive new. A new mailbox warms up for 2 to 3 weeks before its first send, with the warmup included in every plan.