Instantly Email Warmup: Is It Good or Bad? (Our Complete Review)
Instantly email warmup is built to help you send cold emails safely at scale, but the real question is whether it actually fits the way you run outreach.
It uses a large deliverability network, AI-generated warmup conversations, and a dashboard that shows inbox vs spam placement.
On the surface, it sounds like a complete warm-up solution.
But before turning it on and trusting it fully, it’s worth looking at how this warmup actually behaves once you start sending, and whether it fits the way you run outreach.
Let’s break it down so you can decide with clarity.
TL;DR
- Instantly email warmup works well if you only need a basic warmup to prepare your mailbox.
- It gives you 1-click activation, AI warmup emails, Slow Ramp, and a dashboard to see inbox and spam placement.
- But it doesn’t cover deeper deliverability needs like DNS checks, placement tests, or domain health monitoring.
- Warmforge is the best alternative if you want warm-up plus full deliverability tools, including monitoring, health checks, and placement testing.
- Use Instantly for basic warmup. Use Warmforge when you need stronger deliverability support around your whole setup.
What is Instantly?
Instantly is a cold email outreach tool made for sending emails at scale. It lets you create email sequences, send from multiple inboxes, rotate inboxes automatically, and manage replies in one place.
Along with this, Instantly includes an email warmup system to help keep your inboxes healthy while you run cold email campaigns.
The warmup runs through Instantly’s Deliverability Network, which has more than 1,000,000 real email accounts.
Instantly sends AI-generated warmup emails that look like real conversations.
How to Warm Up an Email with Instantly
Warming up an email in Instantly is very simple because most of the work is automated.
Here’s how to warm up your email :
1. Connect your email account
Start by adding the email account you want to warm up inside Instantly. Once it’s connected, the warmup option becomes available.
2. Turn on warm-up with one click
Instantly lets you start a warm-up with just one click. You don’t need to set up anything complicated; turn it on, and it starts working.
3. Instantly begins Slow Ramp
After activation, Instantly increases your warm-up activity slowly so it looks natural. This helps your account build sender reputation without sudden spikes.
4. AI warmup emails start sending
Instantly sends warmup emails that are AI-generated and look like real conversations. Each warmup email has a unique subject ID, so you can easily tell them apart from your real emails.
5. Adjust the warmup settings if you want
You can set things like:
- How many warm-up emails do you want sent each day
- The open rate
- The reply rate
- The spam protection level
You can leave the defaults if you’re not sure, Instantly recommends starting with them.
6. Check your deliverability dashboard
The dashboard shows:
- Your deliverability score
- How many emails land in the inbox
- How many land in spam
This helps you understand when your account is ready for sending or when it needs more warmup.
7. Keep warm-up running
Instantly suggests keeping warmup on all the time, even when you’re not actively sending. This keeps your reputation improving instead of dropping.
Instantly Email Warmup Features
Instantly’s warm-up system comes with a few clear features. Everything is built to make the warmup process easy and natural.
A Large Network That Supports High Deliverability
Instantly uses a big deliverability network with 1,000,000+ real email accounts, and this number keeps growing. A bigger pool means more positive interactions for your warmup emails.
A Dashboard That Shows Where Your Emails Land
Instantly’s deliverability dashboard shows your score and inbox vs spam placement, helping you understand whether your account is ready to send or needs more warmup time.
A Slow and Safe Warmup Process
Instantly naturally warms your account using a “Slow Ramp,” so the sending volume increases step by step instead of jumping too fast. This helps your sending pattern look stable and reduces the risk of sudden spikes that can hurt your sender's reputation.
Warmup Activity That Looks Natural
Your warmup activity runs through a private network of headless browsers, which makes the interactions look more natural.
AI- Warmup Emails That Feel Real
All warmup emails are AI-generated and written to look like real conversations.
Every warmup email also has a unique ID in the subject line, so you can easily spot them.
Settings to Control How Warmup Runs
Instantly lets you decide how fast or slow your warmup goes. You can keep it gentle or increase activity as your account becomes more stable.
There’s also an option to enable read emulation, where the system spends time scrolling through your warmup emails.
Where Instantly Email Warmup is Good
- Warmup, inbox rotation, and sending limits run inside one system, so you don’t have to manually coordinate volume across inboxes.
- Unibox pulls replies from 1,000+ inboxes into one place, making it possible to manage conversations at scale without switching accounts.
- Automated inbox rotation removes the need to track which mailbox is safe to send from each day.
- Outreach stays stable as volume increases, since warmup and sending limits are applied together instead of separately.
- Reporting shows open rates, reply rates, and bounce rates in one view, which makes campaign performance easier to evaluate.
- The reporting data is structured enough to be reused in external BI dashboards, supporting deeper, data-driven analysis.
Where Instantly Email Warmup Is Bad
Here’s where Instantly warm-up becomes limiting or creates challenges.
- Many core outreach features like A/B testing, multiple warmup options, global blocklist, unified inbox, and CRM are not available on the lower plan, which limits how much you can do early on.
- Domain setup is not fully automated. When you buy new domains or inboxes, email forwarding is not enabled by default, and this is not clearly communicated during purchase.
“Domain setup problems: when you buy new emails/domains, they don’t enable forwarding. This isn’t mentioned at purchase” -Lukestgoerge, Trustpilot
- You must log into each Google account manually to configure forwarding, which becomes time-consuming when managing multiple inboxes.
- The platform can show conflicting readiness signals. Domains may appear “100% healthy” in the dashboard, yet you’re still required to wait an additional two weeks before sending.
- You don’t get placement tests, so you can’t see whether emails land in Primary, Promotions, or Spam across providers.
“They don't have analytics like the other platforms so I can't tell if my emails are getting opened. I've followed all best practices and deliverability continues to be poor - all of my emails go to Spam.”- Instantly user, Trustpilot
- There’s no domain-level audit. Instantly doesn’t check DNS records, MX records, or blacklist status.
- When deliverability drops, you only see the outcome, not the cause. There’s no way to trace issues back to setup or infrastructure.
Warmforge: A Better Instantly Alternative for Infrastructure-Level Deliverability
Warmforge is an email deliverability and warm-up tool built to help you to fix inbox placement.
While Instantly mainly focuses on warming inboxes, Warmforge also monitors your email setup, checks domain health, and runs placement tests so you can clearly see where your emails land and spot issues early.
Warmforge fits well when you want more visibility and more support across your whole email setup, not just warmup interactions.
Here’s where Warmforge stands out:
- It offers email warmup with one click, using AI-written emails that signal legitimacy to email service providers.
- It includes Monitoring & Health Checks, so you can keep track of DNS records, MX records, blacklist status, and overall domain health.
- You can run Placement Tests to see where your emails land across the inbox, promotions, or spam.
- Warmforge highlights common deliverability issues like incorrect DNS setup, unverified leads, sending too many emails from one mailbox, and not monitoring deliverability, and gives tools to address those areas.
- Warmforge has Always-On Warm Up, keeping your mailboxes warmed continuously.
- A free email deliverability audit that checks your DNS, MX, blacklist status, and more.
Get a free deliverability audit and see if your DNS, MX records, or blacklist status need fixing.
Conclusion
Instantly email warmup is a good option when you only need a simple, automated warmup to get your mailbox ready for outreach. It’s easy to turn on, requires no technical work, and gives you a basic view of your inbox and spam placement.
If you need more than basic warmup, like checking your DNS, running placement tests, watching domain health, or understanding why emails land in spam, Instantly doesn’t cover those areas.
Warmforge is a better fit in those cases, since it adds monitoring, health checks, placement tests, and a full deliverability audit on top of warmup.
Get 1 free warming slot and 1 free placement test with Warmforge to see your deliverability clearly.