---
title: Warmup pools
description: How shared warmup pools work, why pool quality beats pool size, and what "dedicated" should mean.
---

A warmup pool is a group of mailboxes that send warmup mail to one another. Your mailbox sends a short message to another mailbox in the pool. That mailbox opens it, sometimes replies, and the pattern reverses with mail from another pool member.

## What a warmup pool is

From a mailbox provider's point of view, the pattern looks like normal individual mailbox activity: low volume, conversational, mixed senders.

## Why pool quality matters more than size

Some tools advertise "5,000+ inboxes in the pool". Sounds impressive. It almost always isn't.

A pool of 5,000 mailboxes mostly assembled from free-tier signups and throwaway providers gives you essentially zero positive signal. Modern mailbox providers either ignore signals from low-trust addresses entirely, or treat them as negative ("why is this mailbox corresponding with so many disposable inboxes?").

A pool of 500 vetted, warmed, monitored mailboxes across the major receivers is dramatically more useful.

## What a healthy pool looks like

- **Diverse**: spans Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud, and a representative share of self-hosted IMAP servers.
- **Monitored**: every member has spam-score tracking; misbehaviour removes the mailbox from the pool.
- **Conversational**: reply rate inside the pool ~30%; the pool exchanges threads, not one-off blasts.
- **Avoidance-aware**: the same two mailboxes don't pair up over and over (recent-partner gap of 7 days or more).
- **Token-verified**: every message carries a verification token; invalid tokens flag the sender.

## Free vs premium pools

Free pools are useful for testing the mechanics but include higher-risk members. Premium pools should:

- Only include warmed mailboxes meeting reputation criteria.
- Apply stricter quarantine thresholds than free pools.
- Keep a separate recovery pool for senders coming back from quarantine.
- Never silently mix free-tier mailboxes into the premium recipient set.

In Warmbly, free and premium pools are physically separated. Dedicated-worker customers still participate in the premium pool by default: dedicated infrastructure is for isolation and IP control, not a reputation shortcut.

## What "dedicated" should mean

A dedicated worker is a worker process and IP allocated to your organisation. It gives you:

- Predictable sending IP.
- Isolation from other tenants' bad days.
- The ability to negotiate IP allowlisting with specific partners.

It does _not_:

- Bypass per-mailbox health rules.
- Let you ignore complaint or bounce thresholds.
- Magically warm a brand-new IP. Dedicated IPs need their own warmup ramp.

## Re-entry after quarantine

A quarantined mailbox shouldn't automatically re-enter the pool just because time elapsed. Re-entry should require:

- Healthy SPF, DKIM, DMARC.
- No recent complaints or hard-bounce spikes.
- No recent invalid warmup-token attempts.
- Spam-folder placement under 10% on a probation sample.
- Gradual ramp on re-entry, starting at 5–10/day warmup.

> Pool quality is shared infrastructure. A platform that lets one bad mailbox keep participating to avoid an awkward support conversation taxes every other paying customer.
