How many cold emails can you send per day without hurting your domain?
· 2 min read · MAALI team
There's no single magic number, but there is a safe way to think about it. Mailbox providers watch how people react to your mail. Volume matters less than whether recipients open, reply, ignore or report it. Low volume of relevant email is the safest thing a small sender can do.
A sensible starting point
For a mailbox that's new to cold outreach:
- Week 1: 5 to 10 new emails a day
- Weeks 2 to 3: 15 to 20 a day, if nothing looks wrong
- After that: 20 to 40 a day per mailbox is plenty for most freelancers and small agencies
If you need more, add mailboxes rather than pushing one harder. And remember follow-ups count towards your daily sending too.
These are conservative numbers on purpose. A researched email to a store that fits your offer is worth ten generic ones, and you can only review so many drafts a day anyway.
Protect your main domain
Send cold outreach from a separate domain, like getyourstudio.com instead of yourstudio.com, with its own mailbox. If something goes wrong, your main domain (and your invoices, client email and logins) is unaffected.
Set up the basics on that domain before you send anything:
- SPF and DKIM, from your email provider's setup guide
- DMARC, starting with a monitoring policy
- A real website or a redirect to your main site, so the domain looks legitimate
Spread sending out
Fifty emails at 9:00:00 looks like a machine. The same fifty spread across the working day looks like a person. Send on weekdays, during business hours in your time zone, with a few minutes between messages.
Signs you're sending too much
Slow down for a week if you see any of these:
- Bounce rate above a few percent (your list has bad addresses, or stores have closed)
- Replies drying up suddenly on similar emails
- People mentioning your email went to spam
- Warnings or sending limits from your provider
Bounces are the easiest to fix: send only to addresses the store publishes itself, and remove anything that bounces immediately.
What matters more than volume
- Relevance. Emails that mention something real about the store get read and answered, and that engagement is what providers reward.
- Plain text. No images, no tracking-heavy templates, one link at most.
- An easy opt-out. An unsubscribe link and honouring "no" right away keeps complaints near zero.
How MAALI helps
MAALI sends from your own mailbox with limits you set: a daily cap for the mailbox and for each campaign, weekdays only, business hours in the mailbox's time zone, spaced out across the day. Every email includes an unsubscribe link and one-click unsubscribe headers. Bounces, unsubscribes and "no" replies are added to your do-not-contact list automatically.
Start low, keep it relevant, and let the replies tell you when to grow.
Keep reading
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The apps a Shopify store runs tell you what it already has, what it's missing, and how much it spends. How to read them, and how to turn them into a prospect list for your service.
Copy-ready cold email templates for agencies, app developers, photographers, copywriters, email marketers and speed specialists, each built around one real observation about the store.
What to look for on a Shopify store before you pitch it, from photos per product to the date of the newest product, and which service each signal points to.