Top 8 of the Best Email Warm Up tools in 2024

When you become serious about emailing, one thing you want to prevent is that your emails end up in spam. But how can you make sure your emails don’t land up in the spam folder? Warming up your email account may be the solution.

Email warmup has been trending lately in the email industry. When you start diving into email outreach best practices, you will likely be advised to warm up your email account to increase your email deliverability, in other words: increase your chances to end up in the primary inbox folder.

More and more companies are offering email warmup tools and it’s becoming hard to pick one. We’ve written this guide to help you understand what email warmup really is, how to do it properly and pick the right warmup tool (should you actually need one).

Here’s what you’ll learn in this guide:

• what is warming up an email?
• why use an email warm up service? (and do you need one?)
• what is the best email warmup tool?
• how to warm up your email for free?

Before we dive into the details, here is a foretaste of our ranking.

Best email warmup tools in 2024

1. Mailreach
2. Folderly
3. Lemwarm by Lemlist
4. Warmbox
5. Warmup Inbox
6. Mailwarm
7. OutreachBin
8. Warm Up Your Email by MailShake

Find out more on how and why we ranked these warm up tools in this order below.

1. What is warming up an email?

Email warm up is the process of gaining the trust of an email provider over time.

Think of it like a work-out session: before lifting heavy weights or running a long distance, you will prepare your body with low-intensity exercises for 5 to 10 minutes. It’s the same for your email account.

Email service providers such as Gmail, Outlook or Yahoo have implemented strong spam filters. They will check your emails for spam words, filter out anything that seems unsolicited and ensure that your email activity looks normal. If you start sending hundreds of emails from a brand new email account, you will end up in spam pretty quickly.

Thus, it’s a best practice to warm up your email account before starting to send a lot of emails, to make sure your emails are well received by your recipients.

Now, you may wonder what email warmup means in concrete words?

Warming up your email helps build your email address reputation. As your email and domain build trust, spam filters will consider your account as trustworthy. That way, your emails won’t end up in spam.

Note: Email warmup is also sometimes called IP warmup. To dive into technical details, when you send emails you can use a dedicated IP address. It’s a feature commonly offered by email marketing platforms. When using a dedicated IP, your emails are sent from a single domain that is not shared with other users. It might sound counterintutive, but dedicated IPs are not necessarly better for email deliverabilty, unless you warm up your IP address using an IP warm up service. Indeed, shared IPs might have a better IP reputation as they are older and more reliable than a newly created IP that is not warmed up.

2. Should you use an email warm up service?

There are two ways to warm up your email account. Either you can do it manually or use a dedicated email warmup service that will do the job for you.

Email warmup: the manual way

It is possible to warm up your email manually, but it is a difficult process that will take time.

You’ll need to send emails repeatedly each day and make sure that people you contact respond to you. That’s because getting a high reply-rate is one of the key factors to gain email reputation.

But you won’t gain much reputation if you regularly send emails from let’s say your professional email address to your personal one (and vice-versa). Your reputation score depends on multiple criteria. The reply-rate, which is just one factor amongst many others, takes into account how many different email addresses you get replies from. Worst, most advanced algorithms, also take into account the reputation of the email address that replies to you.

Think of it a little bit like the Pagerank algorithms in SEO. The best ranked websites that link to your own website, send you more domain reputation than spammy websites.

Therefore, manual email warming takes time and many efforts. That’s why so many warmup solutions have taken the leap. And given the quality of the automated inbox warming options available, warming your account manually isn’t the greatest use of your time.

Email warmup: using an email warmup service

Otherwise, you can use an email warmup service to do this process automatically.

Email warm up tools will connect to your email inbox and do the warm up for you over several weeks. Their service ensures that your email activity will be consistent with high engagement rates.

How do email warmup tools work behind the scenes?

Email warm up tools use different methods for warming emails.

Some email warmup services will make your address interact with other members from their user base, that’s how Lemwarm or GMass work for example. Your account will be sending emails to other users and will reply to their incoming emails. It might cause some privacy issues as you may not want your address to be interacting with other real users from your email warmup service.

Other services have built a network of email addresses entirely dedicated to the purpose of warming up emails (such as Mailwarm or Warmbox). Of course, this has also disadvantages because this network isn’t constituted of email addresses used by real people. It’s only a computer generated network and you can’t know for sure that anti-spam filters won’t be able to catch this method.

When it comes to the actual content email warm up tools send from your inbox, it varies depending on the service you use. Some warm up tools use human and unique email copy in each of your warming emails. Others will stuff the warming emails with random words that may look less natural (even though these warm up tools promise that it will still be enough to trick anti-spam filters).

Do I need to warmup my email?

If you’re really serious about email deliverability, then using an email warm up service might be worth trying. Why? It will help you warm up your account faster. That’s useful if you have several inboxes for email outreach and want to test ideas in quick manner. In other cases, email warmup can also help you recover from a bad sender reputation.

Still, keep in mind that an email warmup tool is not the panacea for all your email deliverability issues.

You will achieve great results, just by making sure you actually follow our essential email deliverability guidelines.

3. Top 8 of the best email warm up tools

We have tested for you all the email warm up software available online and picked the 10 best cold email warm up services in 2024. We ranked them according to several factors, including:

• Email Warm Up method: do they make your account interact with other users from their database, a network of computer generated mailboxes or a mix of both?
• Email Warm Up focused: are these companies focused on email warmup or do they just offer warm up service to appeal customers?
• Warm Up Features: what differentiating functionalities do these tools offer?
• Pricing & Free trial: how much do email warmup tools cost and do they offer a free trial?
• Customer reviews, from trusted platforms such as Capterra or G2
• User experience: are these warm up tools easy to navigate and understand?
• Privacy: do these companies emphasize the protection of your data?

Let’s get started:

1. Mailreach

What is Mailreach and how does it work?

Mailreach is a French company created in 2020. It’s a latecomer in the email warm up industry but they already demonstrated a solid execution.

Why rank Mailreach #1? Among all the email warm up tools we tested, Mailreach standed out for a few key reasons: it’s an independant email warmup service, built entirely for that purpose. You can use Mailreach in a standalone way and the platform is solely focused on building a solid warm up tool. Mailreach offers a fully automated warm up for an affordable price. It’s not the least expensive solution, however you get access to a fair amount of features as well as a dedicated support.

To mention a few interesting features: the fact that you can connect multiple ESP (Google, Outlook…), test your emails and get a spam score as well as monitor that your email isn’t blacklisted. It’s worth mentioning that Mailreach’s user interface is simple to navigate. The overall design is cleaner than most warm up solutions we tested.

On the downside, Mailreach has been using a network of computer generated mailboxes to warm up your emails, instead of interacting with other real users. For some, it’s an advantage. However, we may argue that anti-spam filters might identify this technique in the future. Even though your mailbox won’t be exchanging with real users, the email content that Mailreach sends for you is meant to be human and meaningful. Indeed, other warm up tools may just send some random gibberish content to fill in your warm up emails. Mailreach is now using more and more its peer-to-peer network to warm up your email, so that your mailbox will be exchanging with other real users.

Mailreach features

• 1 email account to warm up
• Fully automated warm up
• Up to 90 emails / day
• Smart warming algorithm
• Deliverability correction
• Advanced Spam tester with insights
• Multiple ESP warm up (Google, Outlook, etc.)
• Monitoring dashboard
• Live blacklists and DNS check ups
• Chat support

Mailreach pricing

Mailreach costs $25 per email account. They also offer custom plans for enterprises. There is no free trial on Mailreach.

Mailreach reviews

Mailreach is ranked 5 / 5 on Capterra, but they only have 12 reviews at the time of writing this article.

2. Folderly

What is Folderly and how does it work?

Folderly presents itself as an AI-powered platform for increasing your email deliverability. The company is one of Belkins’s spin-off, a B2B Lead Generation Agency with a solid track record, created in 2015.

To quickly raise your email reputation, Folderly claims to use its GPT-3 powered intelligence. Machine learning enables automatic email generation and reply processing to mimic human-to-human conversations. They target 0% spam rate and 50% to 80% open rate.

To warm up your email with Folderly, you will need to connect your domain and email address. The tool will then ask you to create a warm up email template and to run a spam test to examine your inbox and identify its deliverability issues. The warm up campaign will finally begin and your email address will interact with Folderly inboxes and paid senders. Not only do they mark emails as “non-spam”, but they also tag them as “important”, and move the emails from the spam folder to the inbox. You can expect 3-4 weeks to be the time for the platform to drastically improve your email deliverability.

Forderly was ranked third for their innovative approach and great user experience. On the downside, Folderly is the most expensive solution we benchmarked.

Folderly features

• AI-based platform
• Complex and proprietary algorithm
• Customized email templates
• Deliverability tests
• Email spam checker tool
• Easy to use tool for beginners
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP or any other inbox

Folderly pricing

Folderly’s subscription starts at $200 per month for unlimited emailing. There’s no free trial.

Folderly reviews

QuickMail is rated 4.9 / 5 on average, out of 84 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

3. Lemwarm by Lemlist

What is Lemwarm and how does it work?

Lemwarm is Lemlist’s email warm up service. It has the distinction of being the first tool to enter the email warming market along with Mailwarm.

The differentiating aspect of this service is its progressive warm up approach: the tool starts by sending a small amount of emails and then gradually increases the quantity. Whereas other warm up companies consider this feature an option, Lemwarm has it integrated.

Lemwarm does not use fake email addresses, but exchanges warm up emails with real people who are also users of the service. LemWarm’s services are used by more than 20,000 people, making it the “#1 warm-up tool on the market,” according to Lemlist.

Once you have logged in your account in Lemlist, you can set the number of emails you want to send each day, and the program will automatically begin to send and respond to emails. Lemwarm makes sure to reply to your emails so that it looks like a real conversation (even though we noticed that emails were most of the time stuffed with random keywords), mark them as important and remove them from the spam folder. Emails that your account sends and receives for the warm up process are automatically labeled in your inbox, so that you can filter them out. After 30 days, your email will be properly warmed up and ready to roll.

Lemwarm features

• A quick and effective tool to warm up your email address
• Complex and proprietary algorithm, which operates on over 100 different parameters.
• Real people with verified emails and no fake accounts in the network
• The user can choose how many emails he wants to send per day (Maximum 30 per day if your email account is less than 6 months and maximum 40 per day if it is more than 6 months).
• 20 000 active users who are used for warming
• 25 years+ domain range
• Connects to any email provider (Gmail warm up service, Outlook warm up service, Mailgun warm up service, Sendinblue warm up service, Mailgun warm up service, Amazon SES warm up service, SMTP warm up service)

Lemwarm pricing

Lemwarm’s services start at a price of $29 for the standard plan which exclusively covers email warm up. If you want more advanced features included in your package, there are two other offerings available covering outreach and engagement services and including API for a maximum price of $99 per month. You can also access a 14-day free trial.

Lemwarm reviews

Lemlist is rated 4.4 / 5 on average, out of 415 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

4. Warmbox

What is Warmbox and how does it work?

Warmbox is a standalone email warming strategy service with excellent user interface and user experience.

One of its standout features is its ability to use different warm up recipes implementing algorithms for optimal email warming according to your needs. Indeed, Warmbox provides daily realistic emails that can be sent in four different ways:

• Growth: The most popular option in Warmbox, as it relies on progressive ramp up.
• Flat: Designed for people who want a precise amount of answers.
• Randomize: Built for experimentation
• Custom: A fully customizable option for cold email experts

Each email is driven by the GPT-3 artificial intelligence algorithm (like Folderly). This language model is used by the company to generate very realistic responses to your emails.

Once you connect your inbox to Warmbox, it will automatically send emails from your email address to its network of +10000 mailboxes. Warmbox automatically recommends the option that best suits you among its 4 warming up recipes. You can change the sending method and increase the number of emails you want to send at any time.

Warmbox features

• AI-based platform
• Complex and proprietary algorithm
• You can choose between 4 different warm up recipes according to your needs
• Ongoing spam score monitoring
• +10000 active inboxes talking to each other
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP or any other inbox

Warmbox pricing

Warmbox charges $15 per month for 50 emails per day. Two other subscriptions are available: the Premium option, which costs $69 per month and allows up to 250 messages per day per inbox, and the Pro option, which costs $139 per month and allows up to 500 messages per day per inbox. This tool does not offer a free trial.

Warmbox reviews

Warmbox didn’t receive reviews on platforms like Capterra or G2 yet, it has a 4.4 / 5 note on Product Hunt out of 24 upvotes.

5. Warmup Inbox

What is Warmup Inbox and how does it work?

Warmup Inbox is a powerful standalone email warming service.

While other providers first focus on ramping up emails progressively, Warmup Inbox starts by filling your inbox. The company asserts that even if it sacrifices quality, the benefits of this method far outweigh the drawbacks. The tool automatically improves your email sending reputation through its network of 7000+ inboxes talking to each other.

Once you sign up, Warmup Inbox floods your inbox with good emails. The tool automatically builds and sends smart dynamic content within every email. It also ensures to automatically pull your emails out of the spam folder and constantly check your domain for blacklists. The company recommends using the service for at least 45 days to fully warm up your inbox.

Warmup Inbox features

• 7000+ active inboxes talking to each other
• Flood of emails
• Adjust dynamic content according to your needs
• Edit sending limits
• Domain tracking
• Provides a “health score” with which you can see whether your inbox is ready
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP or any other inbox

Warmup Inbox pricing

Warmup Inbox’s single plan is $9 per inbox, each month. This program allows you to send 1500 emails per month. You can also access a 7-day free trial.

Warmup Inbox reviews

Warmup Inbox is rated 2.9 / 5 on average, out of 9 reviews on G2 and Capterra. Note: This low rating doesn’t necessarily reflect the Warmup Inbox’s actual value. Indeed, since they have only 9 ratings, a few bad reviews were enough to downgrade their overall note.

6. Mailwarm

What is Mailwarm and how does it work?

Mailwarm is a simple, complete and efficient email warming solution.

Mailwarm helps you achieve the required email activity both quantitatively and qualitatively in order to enter the main inbox. The Mailwarm team has set up +1000 email accounts that will interact with your inbox on a schedule you define. The service offers personalized emails designed to mimic human-to-human conversation. Mailwarm’s methods, according to users of the service, may increase your open rate by up to 30%.

Once you have connected your email account, you can establish an email warm up schedule, and your email account will automatically start sending dozens of emails to Mailwarm inboxes, at the appropriate frequency per day. These emails will be marked as non-spam, opened, starred and responded to. You will also access dashboard monitoring, allowing you to track, control and get insights on your daily activity. If you notice that your inbox is filling up with too many Mailwarm emails, you can establish an inbox rule to store them all in a dedicated folder.

Mailwarm is one of the first email warm up tools that entered the market. This first mover advantage gave them credibility in the email warm up industry. On the downside, one might say that Mailwarm may be resting on its laurels, while other competitors are looking to take over their leading position.

Mailwarm features

• Engage with +1000 Mailwarm’s own email addresses
• Create your own send and reply schedule
• Takes two minutes to set up
• Offers personalized emails designed to be lifelike
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP and many other inboxes

Mailwarm pricing

Mailwarm’s alternatives start at $69 per month, allowing up to 50 emails per day for 1 email account. The company also provides a Growth plan at $159 allowing up to 200 emails per day for 3 email accounts, and a Scale plan at $479 allowing up to 500 emails per day for 10 email accounts. Mailwarm does not provide a free trial.

Mailwarm reviews

Mailwarm is rated 4.5 / 5 on average, out of 21 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

7. OutreachBin

What is OutreachBin and how does it work?

OutreachBin is an email platform that allows you to manage your unsolicited emails and increase the likelihood of delivery with an email warm up tool.

The tool differentiates itself from the others by its unique low-cost offer allowing you to send unlimited mass emails. Subscriptions are provided for two functions: Cold Email and Email Warm Up. These two services are designed with the goal of “increasing your opens, clicks, and conversions.”

OutreachBin’s algorithm works with a peer to peer network, that is to say that your email address exchanges warm up emails with real people who are also eager to warm up their emails. Consequently, when you activate warm up on your email account within OutreachBin you become part of this peer to peer network.

OutreachBin’s program instantly starts to work on warming up your email as soon as you have plugged in your email address. It will start to interact with the tool’s peer to peer network and generate positive interactions such as automatic spam to inbox conversion. The service states that your email address will be warmed up in at least 2 weeks, but also that the more time your inbox spends on the software the better results you will get.

OutreachBin features

• Unique low-cost offer for unlimited emailing
• A quick and effective tool to warm up you email address
• Real people with verified emails and no fake accounts in the network
• Easy to use for beginners
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP or any other inbox

OutreachBin pricing

OutreachBin provides its email warm up tool, its outreach service and its automations for unlimited subscribers and team members at just $29 per month if paid annualy. This tool does not offer a free trial.

OutreachBin reviews

OutreachBin is rated 3.45 / 5 on average, out of 21 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

8. Warm Up Your Email by MailShake

What is Warm Up Your Email and how does it work?

Warm Up Your Email is Mailshake’s email warming tool (it was acquired by Mailshake in June 2021).

It has the distinction to use a team of real people to generate engagement with your emails. Indeed, Warm Up Your Email operates quite differently, so it may work in areas where other warming tools cannot. Since the service responds to your email with humans, your email address will become more trustworthy for a provider. Warm Up Your email also provides helpful free tools to review your DMARC, SPF and SMTP.

To use the service, you will first need to connect your email account to the platform in order for it to start the warm up process and interact with your emails. You will then configure your campaign settings such as daily send volume, subject or body of your email. The tool will consequently start sending emails at the desired volume with the desired content, and you will begin to see data on your dashboard indicating how many people have received, opened and replied to it. You will also have access to a spam score and a spam pattern.

Warm Up Your Email features

• Uses real people to open, reply and engage with your emails
• Spam score and spam pattern monitoring
• Combines human and computer warming
• Provides free tools to examine your DMARC, SPF and SMTP.
• Well suited for freelancers, startups and small businesses
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, SMTP and many other inboxes

Warm Up Your Email pricing

Warm Up Your Email’s offerings start at $29 per month and allow up to 50 emails per day for 1 email account. The company also provides a Pro plan at $49 allowing up to 50 emails per day for 3 email accounts, and an Agency plan at $99 allowing up to 100 emails per day for 8 email accounts. You can also access a 7-day free trial.

Warm Up Your Email reviews

Warm Up Your Email has a 1.9 / 5 note on Product Hunt out of 2 reviews. So it may not reflect its true value.

That’s it! You are now ready to choose the warm up tool that suits you best. For your convenience, find below a list of all the tools we considered when doing research for this article as well as a list of 100% free email warm up tools.

Discontinued email warmup services

Email Warmup by GMass

What is GMass and how does it work?

GMass is an email marketing warm up software based around Google’s Gmail services.

To warm up your email address with GMass, you had to select “Free Email Warmup” in the products section. The tool would then ask you to sign in with your email address, and the latter will start chatting with the +40,000 accounts that were also warming up their email with GMass.

GMass features

• Free email warm up tool (discontinued)
• Receive emails from other users also using the warm up system
• Eight additional mail-specific services such as mail merge, mass emails or domain’s trustworthiness
• Connects to Gmail only

GMass pricing

GMass warm up service offered a free email warm up feature, but it did not provided access to the other eight services available on the tool.

GMass reviews

GMass is rated 4.8 / 5 on average, out of 1559 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

AutoWarmer by QuickMail

What is QuickMail’s Auto Warmer and how does it work?

AutoWarmer was QuickMail’s email warming tool.

AutoWarmer was integrated with QuickMail’s complete cold email automation platform. The defining aspect of this service is its ability to import the audience that matches your needs. AutoWarmer therefore differs from other tools because it adjusts itself to your audience in order to achieve better results. Thus, the messages sent by the warming tool are customized and unique, which allows you to quickly improve the reputation of your email address.

After linking your email account to QuickMail’s Auto Warmer, your email address would automatically start sending and receiving emails from the tool’s inbox network. Emails will then be opened and replied to, as if you were actually chatting with a friend or colleague.

If your emails are ever detected in the spam filter, they will be automatically marked as ‘not spam’ and transferred to the main inbox to minimize the chance that it happens again. After a short time, you will be able to prove to ESPs (email service providers) that you are a reliable sender who sends and receives real emails, making them less likely to report your email campaigns as spam.

After being sent or received, Auto Warmer’s emails were also immediately deleted from your inbox to ensure it remains tidy during the warming process.

QuickMail’s Auto Warmer features

• Powerful tool to warm up your email address
• Gives you access to a free email warming
• Audience import service
• Designed specifically for cold emailers
• Engagement group constituted of real people and real email addresses
• Detailed reports provided to see where your emails land
• Connects to Gmail, Outlook, or any other inbox

QuickMail’s Auto Warmer pricing

QuickMail’s AutoWarmer service gave you access to a free email warming option, for up to 50 inboxes per account. Two other subscriptions are still available: the Premium option, which costs $49 per month and allows up to 500 messages per day per inbox, and the Pro option, which costs $69 per month and allows up to 1500 messages per day per inbox. You can also access a 14-day free trial as well as 2 month free with annual payment.

QuickMail’s Auto Warmer reviews

QuickMail is rated 4.75 / 5 on average, out of 82 reviews on G2 and Capterra.

List of email warmup tools:

• AutoWarmup
• Folderly
• Gmass (discontinued)
• Inboxignite
• IPwarmup
• Instantly
• Lemwarm
• Mailgun’s IP warm up
• Mailivery
• Mailreach
• Mailwarm
• Murlist email warm up
• NeverSpam by Allegrow
• Outreach Bin
• QuickMail Auto Warmer (discontinued)
• Reply.io’s warm up
• Smartreach warm up
• Warm Up Your Email
• Warmbox
• Warmup Inbox
• Warmy
• Woodpecker’s warm up
• WUME (warm up my email)

List of free email warm up solutions:

• Gmass (discontinued)
• Auto Warmer by QuickMail (discontinued)
• AutoWarmUp

List of email warmup lifetime deals

• Email Warmup - Available on AppSumo (Sold out)
• Mail Warm - Available on AppSumo (beware, it’s not the same as Mailwarm presented above)
• Murlist - Available on AppSumo
• Instantly - Available on AppSumo

This article highlights the best email warm up tools in 2024. Now that you know more about email warmup, you probably want to know how long it takes to warm up your email? And, when can you turn off your email warming software?

The warm up time of an email address depends on the tool used, the method it uses to warm up your inbox, and the parameters you set yourself, such as the speed and volume of emails sent. However, after having studied many warm up tools, the minimum period of time for warming up your email is 3 weeks.

Conclusion

Most email warm up tools will recommend you to never stop warming your inbox to maintain a high deliverability. That’s maybe the downside of relying on such warm up tools. Indeed, while it’s certainly helpful to warm up an email account automatically, always keep in mind that email warmup tools’ business models are to keep you as a customer for the longest time possible.

March 2023 updated: Google recently announced that they will be shutting down email warm-up services that use their API. Email warm-up services were designed to improve email deliverability by gradually increasing the sending volume of a new email account to establish a positive reputation with email providers like Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft.

This decision is based on their belief that email warm-up services put strain on their systems and are a violation of their terms of service. This move is not surprising, as email warm-up services have been under scrutiny for some time due to the potential for abuse by spammers and other malicious actors.

Google’s decision to ban email warm-up services connected to their API means that these services will no longer be able to use Google’s infrastructure to send emails. Instead, they will need to use a the IMAP method that is may be less efficient and more time-consuming for end users. However, even the IMAP method may not be a viable workaround for long, as Google is likely to crack down on any workarounds that violate their terms of service.

Overall, this decision is a blow to email warm-up services, as Google is one of the largest email providers and a key component of many email warm-up strategies. It is also a reminder that email warm-up services are not a magic solution for email deliverability and that businesses should focus on building authentic relationships with their email subscribers instead of relying on shortcuts.

In conclusion, email warm up services can be interesting to boost your deliverability or to recover a bad sender reputation, especially if you’re really serious about cold emailing. Like everything in email marketing, take some time to run your own tests, increase the volume when you’re confident enough with the results, and use a trusted email marketing platform, like Mailmeteor, to send your emails!