Over the years, I have seen more and more of these so-called “domain warmup” tools appear. These tools are used to warm up new domains used in cold outreach.

Many of the cold outreach tools have this functionality built-in, but lately, I have been seeing more and more dedicated services that offer this service.

Let’s look at an example from one of these services, which shall remain unnamed.

The service does not even try and hide the fact that it is aimed at cold outreach.

They also work with a bunch of services, all of which has a zero spam policy, and as was explained in this article, cold outreach = UCE = Spam!

Actually, this happens when spamming and has nothing to do with email warm up!

Here you can see exactly how they TRY and trick filters into believing that the spam is actually wanted email. Thankfully, the filters are much smarter than these spam enablers, and the messages all go to spam eventually. Just from the text below, it also looks like this sales page was written using GPT-3, and not by an actual human!

The pure scale of this spam enablement operation!

 

Google finally takes action!

One of the owners of one of the cold outreach tools, posted the image below on Twitter. It was sent to his company from Google, and they are effectively shutting down their ability to automatically warmup sending domains.

This is bad news for any of the companies involved in this despicable practice, but, it is FANTASTIC news for everyone who are completely fed up with the deluge of garbage spam from the “growth hackers”, cold outreaching to sell their garbage.

GOOD RIDDANCE!

I truly hope that all other mailbox providers follow suite!

Email notification from Google about domain warmup service.

Email notification from Google about domain warmup service.

The full text:

Time sensitive: compliance with Gmail API services user data policy

We found during a compliance audit that your project ID [REDACTED] is in violation of the Gmail API services user data policy:

Applications that use multiple accounts to abuse Google policies, bypass Gmail account limitation, circumvent filters and spam, or otherwise subvert restrictions are prohibited from accessing Gmail API scopes.

To maintain access to the Gmail API, you must disable the email warming feature by February 13, 2023. If you are unable to remedy these violations, your access to the Gmail API will be revoked.

To ensure that user messages are not flagged as spam, we recommend your users instead set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC email standards for Gmail by following these instructions. (link)

For more information, refer to the following sources:

OAuth Application Verification FAQ
Google APIs Terms of Service
Gmail API Services User Data Policy
Google API Services ser Data Policy

Thank you for your patience. If you have any other questions, reply directly to this email. Note that any new email sent to api-oauth-dev-verification@google.com won’t go to our team.