How to Warm Up a Cold Email Domain Before Your First Campaign (Using Apify)

You registered the domain. You set up Apollo or Instantly. You loaded 400 prospects and hit send. Two weeks later you find out you have been sending into spam folders the entire time. Your domain is flagged in Google Postmaster Tools. Your sequence never reached a single inbox. This is not a rare edge case. It is the default outcome for any founder who launches cold outbound without a domain warmup protocol. The Problem: New Domains Have Zero Reputation Email service providers (ESPs) like Gmail and Outlook evaluate every sending domain against a reputation score. A freshly registered domain has no score — and no score reads as suspicious. When you send 400 emails from a zero-reputation domain on day 3, the ESPs see: High volume from an unknown sender No prior reply history No established relationship with recipients The result: your emails go to spam. If enough recipients mark them as junk, your domain gets flagged. Once flagged, even your legitimate emails — password resets, receipts,