# Instantly Email Warmup and Sending Limits, Explained

*How-to — 2026-10-12 — by Mahmoud Zalt*

How Instantly warmup works, how to switch it on, the daily limits it recommends per inbox and per campaign, and the health score to watch before launch.

**Short answer.** **Click the flame icon next to an account on the Email Accounts dashboard to switch warmup on, then leave it alone for at least two weeks before you launch a campaign.** Instantly's documentation says warmup starts at the next midnight UTC, recommends 30 campaign emails plus 10 warmup emails per account per day, and treats a health score above 90 percent as good. Warmup emails do not count toward your campaign limits.

**About this guide.** This guide is based on publicly available information and Instantly's own documentation, checked on 17 August 2026. Sistava is not affiliated with Instantly. Interfaces and pricing change often, so confirm the current steps in their documentation before you rely on them.

Warmup and sending limits are the two halves of the same job: convincing Gmail and Outlook that a brand new mailbox belongs to a real person rather than a machine. Warmup builds the evidence. Limits stop you throwing that evidence away in an afternoon.

Instantly documents both quite precisely, which is helpful, because the numbers are the whole point. This guide covers what warmup actually does, how to turn it on, the three different limits that can each stop your sending, and how to read the health score that tells you whether any of it worked.

A brand new mailbox has no history. To a mailbox provider it looks exactly like the throwaway account a spammer registered this morning, because in every measurable respect it is the same thing. Warmup exists to give that account a past before you ask it to do anything ambitious.

## How does Instantly warmup actually work?

Your account sends warmup emails to other accounts in Instantly's warmup pool, and accounts in that pool send warmup emails to you. Their documentation describes the messages being opened automatically, with a high proportion receiving replies carrying positive sentiment. Those interactions are the signals that mailbox providers read as evidence of a legitimate correspondent.

It is worth being clear-eyed about what that means. Warmup does not improve your copy, your list or your offer. It builds one specific thing, a track record of engagement on a new mailbox, and it is genuinely effective at that. It cannot make unwanted mail welcome, and no warmup tool from any vendor can.

Instantly's flame icon carries the state as a colour. Their documentation describes grey for paused, green for the standard pool, blue for a premium or private pool, orange for the basic pool and red for disabled. If you enabled warmup a while ago and never checked back, that colour is the first thing to look at.

### Switching warmup on

1. **Open the Email Accounts dashboard** — This is the same screen that lists every connected inbox with its sending counts, warmup counts and health score.
2. **Click the flame icon next to the account** — Warmup activates on that account. Their documentation notes the sending begins automatically at the next 12:00 AM UTC, so an empty dashboard an hour later is expected rather than broken.
3. **For a batch, use the bulk action instead** — Select the accounts with the checkboxes, click the three dots in the top right, and choose Bulk enable warmup. The same menu offers Bulk pause warmup.
4. **Leave the defaults alone on a new account** — Instantly's guidance is to follow the recommended limit of 10 warmup emails per day on new accounts, and specifically advises against disabling slow warmup while an account is new.
5. **Consider the weekdays only setting** — Their documentation describes a weekdays only option that restricts warmup activity to Monday through Friday. Real business correspondence has a shape, and mostly that shape is not Sunday.
6. **Wait, then check the health score** — Their strategy documentation recommends at least two weeks of warmup before launching campaigns, with pre-warmed accounts as the exception. Watch the health score climb during that time rather than counting days alone.

## What is a good health score in Instantly?

Above 90 percent. Instantly's documentation defines the health score as the percentage of your warmup emails landing in the inbox rather than the spam folder, measured over a seven day window, and states that a score above 90 percent is considered good.

That definition matters more than the number. The score tells you where warmup mail landed among other warmup participants. It is a useful, honest signal about your authentication and reputation, and it is not the same measurement as where your real campaign lands in a stranger's Gmail. Treat a good score as a green light to proceed, not as proof of anything about your actual outreach.

The dashboard also shows an Emails Sent column, which their documentation describes as campaign emails sent today against that account's daily campaign limit, and a warmup column covering warmup emails over the past seven days. Between those three numbers you can tell at a glance whether an account is warming, sending, or quietly stuck.

## How many emails a day should each inbox send?

Instantly's stated recommendation is 30 campaign emails plus 10 warmup emails per email account per day. Their cold email strategy documentation gives a slightly wider range of 30 to 50 sends per inbox, alongside a recommendation of roughly ten secondary domains with three to five accounts each. Their documentation also notes that their done-for-you AirMail mailboxes cap at 20 emails per account per day.

The principle underneath every one of those numbers is the same: grow total volume by adding inboxes, never by pushing more mail through a single one. A hundred emails a day from four inboxes is ordinary. A hundred a day from one new inbox is a reputation problem with a countdown on it.

| Limit | Where it lives | What it caps |
|---|---|---|
| Daily campaign limit, per account | Email Accounts, select the account, Settings | How much that single inbox can send in a day across every campaign it belongs to. Recommended value: 30. |
| Daily limit, per campaign | Campaign Options | Total daily volume for that one campaign across all its accounts. Recommended value: number of accounts multiplied by 30. |
| Company send limit | Settings, Advanced Deliverability | How many people at the same company domain you may email per day. Documented default: 2. Extra sends to that domain are skipped until tomorrow. |

Both of the first two have to be satisfied at once, which is the detail that confuses people. Five accounts with a 30 per day limit each can support a campaign limit of 150, but if one of those accounts is also running a second campaign, its own 30 gets spent across both. The account limit is the true ceiling.

Two smaller controls sit alongside them. Campaign Slow Ramp raises the campaign daily limit by 2 emails per day until it reaches the maximum you set, rather than going to full volume immediately. And a minimum wait time, documented with a one minute default, stops a single account firing across multiple campaigns back to back.

**Warmup emails are free of your limits.** Instantly's documentation states that warmup emails do not count toward either the account limit or the campaign limit. So the recommended 30 plus 10 is not 40 out of a budget of 30, it is 30 campaign sends and 10 warmup sends running side by side. This also means warmup can keep running while a campaign is paused, which is exactly what you want.

## What warmup cannot fix

Warmup sits on top of authentication, it does not replace it. If your SPF, DKIM and DMARC records are missing or misaligned, warmup builds engagement history on an account that mailbox providers still cannot verify. Instantly's own deliverability writing puts authentication first for exactly this reason.

It also cannot fix a bad list. Their guidance is to send only to verified contacts and keep hard bounces low, because bounce rate is one of the strongest negative signals a provider tracks. A perfectly warmed inbox blasting a scraped list will burn its reputation faster than warmup can rebuild it.

- **Two weeks is a minimum, not a guarantee. **Instantly recommends at least two weeks before launching, and their spam-fix writing suggests gating your volume ramp on placement and bounce results rather than on the calendar alone.
- **The health score measures warmup mail, not campaign mail. **It is inbox versus spam placement for warmup emails over seven days. A 95 percent score is encouraging, and it is not a measurement of where your real outreach lands.
- **Warmup starts at midnight UTC. **Nothing happens the moment you click the flame. Their documentation is explicit about the next 12:00 AM UTC start, which explains a lot of unnecessary support tickets.
- **Slow warmup exists for a reason. **Their documentation advises against disabling it on new accounts. The setting is there for people rescuing an established mailbox, not for people impatient with a fresh one.
- **Volume is not a strategy. **Their own published inbox placement benchmark sits near 83 percent across the industry, meaning roughly one in six emails misses the primary inbox even when everything is configured well. Sending more does not raise that number.

Step back and look at the shape of the work. Buy domains, publish records, create mailboxes, enable warmup, wait a fortnight, calculate three interlocking limits, watch a score, then start writing. That is a lot of machinery standing between you and a conversation with a prospect.

Set-up work like this is exactly what we removed at Sistava. Rather than tuning warmup and reconciling limits, you hire an AI Employee and tell it in plain English what you want handled. It has its tools connected already, it asks you when it is unsure, and it sets itself up. Nothing to warm, nothing to maintain.

**Better deliverability is not permission to send more.** Warmup makes wanted mail more likely to arrive. It does not make unwanted mail lawful. Consent, opt-out and sender-identification rules differ by country, and the obligation sits with you as the sender rather than with the platform you send through. Check the rules for every market you contact, honour removal requests promptly, and treat a reply asking you to stop as final.

## FAQ

### How do I turn on warmup in Instantly?

Open the Email Accounts dashboard and click the flame icon next to the account. For several accounts at once, tick their checkboxes, click the three dots in the top right, and choose Bulk enable warmup. Their documentation notes that warmup sending begins at the next 12:00 AM UTC, so an empty dashboard immediately afterwards is normal.

### How long should I warm up an inbox before sending cold email?

Instantly's cold email strategy documentation recommends at least two weeks of warmup before launching campaigns, with accounts that arrive pre-warmed as the exception. Their writing on spam placement suggests treating that as a floor and gating your volume increases on placement and bounce results rather than on elapsed time alone.

### How many emails per day can I send from one Instantly account?

Their documented recommendation is 30 campaign emails plus 10 warmup emails per account per day, and their strategy documentation gives a range of 30 to 50 sends per inbox. Their done-for-you AirMail mailboxes are documented with a maximum of 20 emails per account per day. The per-account daily campaign limit is set in that account's settings.

### Do warmup emails count toward my daily sending limit?

No. Instantly's documentation states that warmup emails do not count toward the account daily limit or the campaign daily limit. The recommended figure of 30 campaign emails plus 10 warmup emails is therefore two separate allowances running in parallel, not 40 emails drawn from one budget.

### What is a good health score in Instantly?

Above 90 percent. Their documentation defines the health score as the percentage of warmup emails landing in the inbox rather than the spam folder over the past seven days, and describes a score above 90 percent as good. It measures warmup traffic specifically, so treat it as a readiness signal rather than a measurement of your live campaign placement.

### What is Campaign Slow Ramp and should I leave it on?

It gradually raises a campaign's daily sending limit instead of going straight to full volume. Their documentation describes an increase of 2 campaign emails per day until the maximum is reached, and it can be disabled to hit the limit immediately. On new sending infrastructure, leaving it enabled is the safer choice.

## Sources

- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/5975330-how-to-enable-warmup)How to enable warmup
- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/5975329-how-warm-up-works-and-why-it-s-important)How warm-up works and why it is important
- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/11991261-getting-started-with-email-accounts-dashboard)Getting started with the Email Accounts dashboard
- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/6248612-account-and-campaign-limits)Account and campaign limits
- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/12578026-company-send-limits)Company send limits
- [Instantly Help Center, ](https://help.instantly.ai/en/articles/5975326-instantly-cold-email-strategy)Instantly cold email strategy
- [Instantly blog, ](https://instantly.ai/blog/cold-email-spam-fix/)Why cold emails land in spam and how to fix it
- [Instantly blog, ](https://instantly.ai/blog/spf-dkim-and-dmarc-deliverability/)SPF, DKIM and DMARC for deliverability

**Tags:** instantly-ai, email-warmup, email-deliverability, cold-email, sender-reputation