Email Warmup Service — Why We Don't Sell One

What a standalone warmup service does — and why you can skip it here

A warmup service signs your mailbox into a network of other mailboxes. They send each other mail, open it, reply to it and drag it out of spam. The point is to manufacture the engagement signals mailbox providers look for, so a cold domain looks more established than it has earned.

You do not need that to send on Mails.ai, because there is nothing cold to start from. Your agent sends from agent@yourworkspace.mails.ai on a shared rail with a real record of transactional sending, low complaint rates and verified authentication. It inherits that record on its first message. No subscription, no seed list, no ramp.

The part most warmup marketing will not tell you

If you send from your own domain, that domain has no standing of its own — and no vendor can create one for you. Mailbox providers weight opens, replies, complaints and spam-folder rescues from real recipients. Mail circulated between seed inboxes produces a pattern, not a reputation, and providers have been discounting that pattern for years.

So we will not claim to warm your domain. What you get instead is the part that is real:

• A DKIM keypair generated for your domain automatically — one DNS record to publish
• Delivery over mail servers we own and keep warm, not a box rented this morning
• SPF guidance that merges with your existing record rather than replacing it
• No nameserver move, and no seed network anywhere in the path

Your domain's standing then builds from the mail your product actually sends. One limit to know up front: mail from a custom domain cannot reach Outlook or Hotmail recipients yet — mail from your mails.ai subdomain reaches them normally.

Send from day one, and watch the real signal

There is no warmup period to sit through on the shared rail, and for your own domain the thing to watch is delivery on real traffic rather than a ramp schedule:

# Send — no warmup state to wait on
curl https://api.mails.ai/v1/messages \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MAILS_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "agent": "support",
    "to": ["customer@example.com"],
    "subject": "Your order shipped",
    "body_text": "Tracking: 1Z999..."
  }'

# Your own domain's verification state (this is what gates custom-domain sending)
curl https://api.mails.ai/v1/domains/dom_123 \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MAILS_API_KEY"

# {
#   "id": "dom_123",
#   "domain": "mail.yourapp.com",
#   "status": "verified",         // pending -> verifying -> verified
#   "provider": "ownmetal",
#   "dns_records": [ /* each with "verified": true */ ],
#   "fail_reason": null
# }

Shared address or your own domain

Agents that need an inbox immediately start on their own AI email address and need no warmup at all. Move to a custom domain when you want your brand in the from address — add it, publish the DKIM record, and sends switch over once it verifies. Nothing about the shared rail stops working while you do.

What it costs

There is no warmup line item, because there is no warmup product. The free tier is $0/mo and covers 3,000 events and one agent on your workspace subdomain. Sending from your own domain starts at $20/mo, which also lifts you to five agents. A dedicated IP is available on request on Scale — see automated dedicated IP warm-up for why most senders are better off without one, free email warmup for the short version, or email service that handles dedicated IPs and warmup options if you are evaluating which platform covers both.