Warming up a new email account is not optional anymore. If you're sending cold emails without warming your inbox, chances are, your emails aren’t even reaching the inbox.
If you've ever tried cold outreach, you already know: a fresh inbox without warm-up is a risk. Even if your message is perfect, it won’t matter if it doesn’t get seen.
We decided to run a test on Lemwarm with 30 email accounts across Gmail, Outlook and custom domains for a small outbound agency working with SaaS startups and lead gen teams to check its effectiveness.
In this Lemwarm review, you’ll get our full take:
Let’s dive in.
Let’s say you just set up a new inbox and start sending cold emails right away.
Here’s what usually happens:
Cold email deliverability isn’t just about writing good messages anymore.
It’s about email reputation, inbox placement, and building trust with providers like Gmail and Outlook.
That’s where warm-up helps.
Email warm-up means slowly sending and receiving real-looking emails to show that your inbox is safe and active.
This builds your sender score over time, and avoids your email going into spam
Warming up one inbox is simple. You can even do it manually if you have time.
But when you're managing 10, 20, or 30+ accounts across a team or multiple domains?
That’s when warm-up becomes a full-time task. And that’s exactly why tools like Lemwarm exist, to take care of it automatically.
We’ve done both. Manual and automated. For a single inbox, manual work. But if you’re running outreach at any kind of scale, automation isn’t just helpful, it’s necessary.
To really see what Lemwarm can do, we used it across 30+ inboxes—a mix of Gmail, Outlook, and custom domain email accounts.
Our Setup:
Settings We Used:
We used Lemwarm’s default setup for most accounts, but made a few tweaks:
What We Tracked:
To track performance, we focused on 4 simple metrics:
👉 When did we start seeing results?
For most accounts, we saw a noticeable improvement in inbox placement after 10 to 14 days. That’s usually when warm-up starts paying off.
Lemwarm offers two main plans, both priced per inbox:
Best for: Freelancers, solopreneurs, early-stage users warming 1–2 inboxes
Best for: Teams needing deeper insights, better deliverability tracking
No separate free trial, but Lemlist users get the Essential plan free for one inbox.
Lemwarm actually surprised us in a few areas—especially during the first two weeks.
We started with a few cold inboxes that barely had any history. By Day 14, inbox placement had jumped from 62% to 88% on most of them.
That’s a big improvement in just two weeks.
Here’s a quick snapshot from our test:
We weren’t just guessing either—we tracked this using inbox monitoring tools and our own deliverability checks.
We’ve tested other warm-up tools before, but Lemwarm stood out in a few ways, especially when used across 30+ inboxes. Here’s what we appreciated most:
Connecting Gmail, Outlook, and custom domains was fast. Just a few clicks, no complicated setup. Even with a large volume, we had everything live within hours.
Other tools need a full DNS config upfront. Lemwarm let us start warming first and fix DNS later.
Lemwarm didn’t rush sending. It started with 5–10 emails/day and scaled gradually to 50+. Older inboxes warmed faster, newer ones more cautiously—just how it should be.
Lemwarm shows inbox placement right on the dashboard. We didn’t need to plug in extra tools like GlockApps.
This helped us catch underperforming inboxes early and pause them when needed.
Auto-replies weren’t robotic. They included context, like subject lines or common phrases, making them feel like real conversations.
Compared to Mailreach or Instantly, Lemwarm’s replies felt more natural.
“It honestly looked like two people emailing back and forth, not bots.”
Many tools slow down on weekends. Lemwarm didn’t. The consistent flow helped us keep the sender's reputation stable without drops.
Whether it was Gmail, Outlook, or domains, performance was solid. Older inboxes hit 90% inbox rate in 10 days.
Newer ones took around 14–18 days, but still improved steadily.
Lemwarm handled the basics well. But once we crossed the 30-inbox mark, a few things started to feel limiting.
If you’re managing cold email at scale like we are, here’s what you might notice too:
With 5 inboxes, no problem. But at 30+, jumping between accounts became a headache.
There’s no single view to manage them all, so we found ourselves clicking back and forth constantly just to check progress.
We wanted to see which domains were improving, which ones weren’t—but Lemwarm doesn’t give you that kind of big-picture data.
In the end, we had to build our own Google Sheet just to track trends across accounts.
A few inboxes randomly sent fewer emails, even though we didn’t touch any settings.
It didn’t happen every day, but it was enough to throw off the warm-up timeline for those accounts.
This one caught us off guard. One of our domains had a broken SPF record, and Lemwarm didn’t flag it.
The warm-up still ran, but it wasn’t doing much good. We only caught it later by running a DNS check manually.
Lemwarm runs emails through its own internal network, which works fine for most inboxes.
But if you're managing client domains or brand-new cold domains, you might want something more isolated and under your control.
These things didn’t stop us from using Lemwarm. But once our inbox count grew, they made it harder to manage everything smoothly.
That’s when we started looking at other tools that could handle scale a bit better.
We didn’t just rely on our own experience. Before and during our test, we looked through dozens of Lemwarm reviews on G2, GetApp, Reddit, and a few cold email forums.
The feedback was mostly positive, but with a few recurring issues mentioned by advanced users.
Here’s a snapshot of what real users had to say:
Lemwarm isn’t the only tool out there. If you’re comparing options or wondering what else is available, here are three solid Lemwarm alternatives we’ve either used or tested.
Each one comes with different strengths depending on how many inboxes you’re managing and how hands-on you want to be.
There’s no one-size-fits-all. If you’re just starting or managing under 10 inboxes, Lemwarm still gets the job done.
But if you're scaling fast or need better visibility, you’ll start to notice the gaps, and that’s when tools like Warmforge come in.
After running Lemwarm for a few weeks across 30+ inboxes, we started running into a few real-world issues, especially around bulk tracking and overall warm-up control.
At first, we tried working around it manually. But checking inboxes one by one, updating our own sheets, and trying to catch DNS issues on our own started to slow us down.
So we looked into other options that were built with scale in mind.
That’s when we decided to try out Warmforge.
Lemwarm is great if you’re warming a few inboxes.
But if you're scaling campaigns across dozens of accounts, Warmforge might save you time, credits, and deliverability headaches.
We made the switch, and here’s why.
With Lemwarm, we had to check each inbox individually. Warmforge gave us a clean dashboard that showed all inboxes in one view—warm-up progress, issues, and reputation trends.
Instead of using a shared IP network, Warmforge ran each inbox in its own controlled warm-up flow. That felt safer, especially for new domains that hadn’t built trust yet.
If an inbox had a broken SPF or a missing DKIM record, we got notified immediately. That saved us from warming up broken setups without realizing it.
We expected onboarding to be slow. But it wasn’t. Connecting all 30+ inboxes took minutes, and even our non-technical team members handled it with no issues.
It didn’t feel like we were switching to a whole new system. It just felt like the natural next step after outgrowing Lemwarm.
Warmforge pricing starts at $12 per inbox, and goes as low as $3/inbox with volume. That made a big difference when managing dozens of accounts.
If you’re just getting started with cold outreach or running a handful of inboxes, Lemwarm is one of the easiest tools to use.
It’s beginner-friendly, quick to set up, and gets the job done for small teams.
But once we crossed into managing 30+ inboxes, we started feeling the limits.
The lack of bulk tracking, no DNS alerts, and shared warm-up environment made things harder to scale smoothly.
We still recommend Lemwarm for small setups. But if your team is growing or you're handling warm-up for multiple domains, you’ll eventually want more control, better visibility, and less manual work.
That’s what pushed us to explore alternatives—and why we ultimately switched to Warmforge. It gave us the scale, stability, and alerts we needed, without adding complexity.
👉 If you're at the point where managing warm-up is slowing your outreach down, Warmforge might be worth a try.
It's built for scale, and for us, it made the next phase a lot smoother.
So yes, Lemwarm is worth it. Just know when it’s time to level up.