SimpleSend can now send the sequences it drafts. You pick sending domains and mailboxes in the app; SimpleSend registers, authenticates and warms them, paces your sequence conservatively, and puts every reply in one inbox. Here is each part, including what it holds back and what it costs.
One rule sits under all of it. Send cold email from dedicated, authenticated domains, never your main one, and warm them first. That is true whether you send from SimpleSend, Smartlead or Instantly. The difference here is that the setup is done for you. For a tour of the screens, see the Email Sequences page.
Why cold email goes out from separate domains
Your main domain carries your company's everyday email: invoices, support threads, replies to investors. Mailbox providers judge every domain by how its mail is received, and cold outreach, even good cold outreach, draws more ignores, deletes and the occasional spam complaint than ordinary business mail. Put that volume on your main domain and one bad week can follow your whole team into the spam folder.
A lookalike domain limits the blast radius. If you own acme.com, you send cold email from something like getacme.com or tryacme.com, with a few mailboxes on each. Visitors to the lookalike land on your real site, replies come back to mailboxes you control, and if a domain's reputation slips, you retire it without touching the address your customers use.
The other half is authentication. Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC, and Microsoft brought in similar rules for high-volume mail to Outlook.com addresses in 2025. Unauthenticated cold email is increasingly filtered or rejected before anyone sees it.
What SimpleSend sets up for you
Everything lives in the Sequences section of the app, alongside Domains, Mailboxes and the Inbox. Most of the work is SimpleSend's:
| Piece | What SimpleSend does | Your part |
|---|---|---|
| Domains | Registers lookalike domains in your name and redirects each one to your main website | Pick the names |
| DNS | Publishes SPF, DKIM and DMARC for every domain. DMARC starts on a monitoring policy (p=none) you can tighten later, and the Domains page shows a pass or fail for each record | Nothing, unless a check fails |
| Mailboxes | Creates Google or Microsoft mailboxes, up to five per domain (three is the recommended number) | Choose the sender names |
| Warmup | Starts on its own when a mailbox is created and keeps running after it is ready | Wait two to three weeks |
| Signature and address | Sends every email with the mailbox's signature and your business mailing address printed under it | Write a signature for each mailbox and add the address once, before your first launch |
What SimpleSend does not do is send from an inbox you already use. Sending only from mailboxes created in the app keeps cold volume off your main domain, and keeps authentication, warmup and pacing consistent for every mailbox you send from.
Warmup: two to three weeks, handled for you
A brand-new mailbox has no history, and mailbox providers are wary of strangers. Warmup builds that history by sending and receiving a steady trickle of ordinary-looking email before any cold outreach goes out. In SimpleSend it starts automatically: about two weeks for Google mailboxes, about three for Microsoft. Each mailbox shows Warming until then, and Ready after.
Warmup keeps running after a mailbox turns Ready, which helps hold reputation steady while real volume goes out. Aged domains do help, but a new, fully authenticated domain with two to three weeks of warmup and a slow ramp is a sound start. Our Email Warmup and Domain Health guide goes deeper on reputation and how to monitor it.
Pacing: the defaults, and why they are low
Most deliverability trouble comes from sending too much, too fast, from too few mailboxes. SimpleSend's defaults are deliberately conservative, and the most important one has a ceiling you cannot raise.
| Setting | Default | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Send window | Weekdays, 8am to 5pm in each mailbox's time zone | Business email from a person arrives during business hours |
| Gap between sends | 4 to 9 minutes, randomized, per mailbox | No bursts that look like a machine |
| Daily sends per mailbox | 25. You can raise it to 40, and it never goes above 50 | Low volume per mailbox is the best protection a reputation has |
| New mailbox ramp | 10 a day in the first week of sending, 18 in the second, then your cap | Trust is earned gradually |
| New leads per sequence | 50 a day, with follow-ups on top | First touches spread over days, not hours |
| Mailbox health | A mailbox whose health slips sends less, or pauses, until it recovers | Problems slow down instead of compounding |
Do the math before you launch. Three mailboxes at the default cap send up to 75 emails a day once ramped, enough for a focused list of a few hundred people on a four-step sequence. Need more? Add mailboxes and domains rather than pushing each one harder.
None of this guarantees inbox placement, and nothing can. It is designed to give every email its best chance. The rest comes down to a clean list and copy people want to read.
Turning drafts into a sequence
From a drafted campaign
When SimpleSend finishes drafting a campaign, the last screen offers Send with SimpleSend next to Download CSV. Choose it and the campaign becomes a sequence in which every lead keeps their own researched wording for every step. You pick the mailboxes, check the schedule and launch.
From the builder
You can also start a sequence blank or from a lead list and write shared steps yourself, with merge tags such as {{first_name}} and fallbacks such as {{company|your team}} for missing values. If a tag has no value and no fallback, that email stops rather than going out with a raw tag in it. The builder suits short announcements, or copy you already trust.
Either way, a sequence holds up to 10 steps, with delays of up to 60 days between them, and up to 5,000 leads. Follow-ups go out as replies in the same thread, the way a person follows up.
Pre-flight: what gets held back
Before anything sends, SimpleSend checks every lead and holds back the ones that would hurt your mailboxes or annoy someone. Held leads are listed with the reason, so you can fix them or leave them out:
- Invalid addresses, domains that accept no mail, and system inboxes such as noreply@ or postmaster@
- Catch-all domains, which accept every address and can bounce later (held unless you choose to allow them)
- Anyone on your suppression list, and the same address listed twice
- Leads already live in a teammate's sequence, so two people on your team never email the same person at once
- Companies where someone replied to you in the last 90 days, so a cold email never cuts across a live conversation
- Leads that are missing wording for a step
Send yourself a test to see each step exactly as a lead will. Sending also needs two things from you: a signature on every sending mailbox (set it on the Mailboxes page) and your business mailing address, which is printed under every signature.
- Every mailbox you picked shows Ready, not Warming
- The Domains page shows a pass for SPF, DKIM and DMARC
- Each sending mailbox has a signature, and your mailing address is set
- A test email reads well on your phone
- The held leads, and the reasons they were held, make sense
One inbox for every reply
Replies from every mailbox land in one Inbox in the Sequences section, and a reply stops that lead's follow-ups automatically. You can also stop on an open or a click, though opens are noisy.
Each reply gets a label so you can work the list in order of value: Interested, Wants a meeting, Has a question, Referral, Not now, Not interested, Asked to stop and Wrong person. Out-of-office replies and bounces are marked too, and an out-of-office pauses that lead instead of letting the next step land in an empty inbox.
Open a thread and Draft with AI writes two short replies from the conversation and your brief, ready to edit, and your answer goes out from the same mailbox and thread. Turn on reply alerts and SimpleSend emails you when someone writes back.
Unsubscribes, suppression and bounces
Every email SimpleSend sends carries three things: an opt-out line under the signature (by default, "Not the right person or not interested? Just reply and let me know."), an unsubscribe link, and your business mailing address. Saying no should take one line or one click, and it does.
When someone unsubscribes, asks you to stop, or hard-bounces, their address joins a suppression list shared by your whole team, and pre-flight holds it in every sequence from then on.
If bounces spike on a mailbox or a sequence, SimpleSend pauses it automatically, so a bad list cannot drag a mailbox's reputation down while you are not looking. Clean the list, then resume.
Tracking, without the bot noise
Open and click tracking are on by default, and you can turn either off for any sequence. Security scanners open mail automatically, which inflates open rates in most tools; SimpleSend filters out those machine opens. Each sequence reports sent, opened, clicked, replied, bounced and opted out. Treat replies as the number that matters. There is no built-in A/B test: to compare two angles, split the list into two sequences and compare reply rates once both have finished.
What it costs
Sending is included on Pro ($250/mo), with 1 sending domain and 3 warmed Google inboxes set up for you. Every Teams seat ($215/seat/mo, 3-seat minimum) includes 1 domain and 3 inboxes of its own. On Individual ($50/mo), add Email Sending for $49.99/mo and buy the domains and mailboxes you need at the standard rates, which also apply to extra domains and mailboxes on any plan.
Sending itself uses no credits; credits pay for research and drafting. The 14-day free trial covers research and drafting but not sending, so you can draft during the trial and send once you are on a paid plan.
Prefer your own sender?
Plenty of teams already run Smartlead or Instantly with warmed mailboxes they are happy with. That path stays open. Download the CSV instead of sending: it has stable columns such as step_1_subject and step_1_body for every step, ready to map into Smartlead, Instantly, Apollo, HubSpot, GoHighLevel or a Gmail mail-merge. Our CSV to Smartlead walkthrough shows the mapping step by step. The same rule applies there as here: dedicated, authenticated, warmed domains, never your main one.
Either way, the hard part (research, and writing that sounds like you) is done before the first email goes out. Sending from SimpleSend just removes the setup between a finished draft and a live sequence.
Frequently asked questions
Sources and further reading: Google email sender guidelines; Yahoo sender best practices; running LinkedIn and email together. Defaults described here are SimpleSend's as of October 2026.