The sending setup that decides whether a verified list lands in the inbox or the spam folder: what it involves, what it costs, and how long it takes.
Cold outreach carries an unavoidable rate of spam complaints and bounces. Whatever domain sends it absorbs that damage. If cold email goes out from nespola.io, a bad campaign doesn't just underperform. It degrades the deliverability of every invoice, support reply and internal message the company sends afterwards.
Domain reputation is slow to build and slow to repair. The fix is standard practice: dedicated sending domains, separate from the brand, treated as consumable. If one is damaged, it's replaced for the price of a domain rather than nursed back over months.
The domain that runs your business and the domain that runs cold outreach should never be the same domain, and should share no reputation between them.
Two dedicated sending domains, both .com. Two rather than one so that reputation damage is contained: if one is blacklisted the other keeps sending, and the campaign never stops entirely.
On the extension: spam filters weight TLD reputation, and .com carries the strongest of any extension. Newer TLDs such as .io, .ai and .publishing are over-represented in spam corpora and land in the spam folder measurably more often. For a sending domain, .com is both cheaper and better.
Both read as legitimate Nespola divisions in the right category. A recipient who checks the sender finds a real publishing company, not a throwaway. Alternatives if you prefer a different feel: nespolapress.com, nespolastudio.com, nespolaauthors.com.
Buy nespola.ai as a brand asset, but don't send cold email from it. It's the natural domain for an AI publishing platform and leaving it open for a competitor to register is a real risk. Park it or point it at nespola.io, and send from the two .com domains. Total: ~€20/yr for sending, plus ~€76/yr for the brand asset. If only one is possible, the sending domains are what the campaign depends on.
Cold sending limits are per mailbox, not per domain. Reaching meaningful daily volume means several mailboxes, but concentrating them on one domain concentrates all the risk there too. The working ratio is 3 mailboxes per domain, maximum.
Every mailbox has to be a real Google Workspace account with its own licence. Aliases do not work: an alias delivers into the same mailbox, and Google's sending limits are per account, not per address. Six aliases on one account give you the capacity of one. Six accounts give you the capacity of six, which is why you pay for six licences.
Without full authentication, cold email is filtered before content is even assessed. These are not optional and not partially satisfiable: all three, on every sending domain.
A brand-new domain with no sending history that suddenly emits 180 emails a day is the clearest spam pattern there is. Reputation has to be built before it can be spent, and that takes 3–4 weeks of automated warm-up with cold sending switched off.
This is the single longest lead time in the entire project, longer than acquiring and enriching the data. The list will be ready before the infrastructure is. It's also the step most often skipped, and skipping it is the most common reason a good list produces poor results.
Domains registered, redirects live, SPF/DKIM/DMARC set, mailboxes created, tracking domains configured.
Automated warm-up builds sending reputation across all mailboxes. Zero cold emails during this window.
Start at ~10 emails per mailbox per day and build to 30 across the week. Never straight to full volume.
~180 emails per day sustained, with deliverability monitored continuously and volume pulled back at the first sign of trouble.
Because warm-up runs independently of the data, buying the domains today costs nothing in wasted effort and removes 3–4 weeks from the launch date. Every week of delay here moves the launch back by the same week, regardless of how fast everything else moves.
The plan is chosen on contacts, not emails: 180 sends a day is ~4,000 a month on working days and fits inside Growth, but the ~3,000 contacts the OSINT engagement delivers do not, because Growth caps at 1,000. Both plans include unlimited mailboxes and warm-up.
Optional: nespola.ai as a parked brand asset, ~€76 a year.