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Week 0: the two weeks a new domain earns before it sends anything cold

This is one section of a six-file deliverability pack, given here in full. It is the part people skip, and skipping it is the single most common reason a good list burns inside a week.

Week 0 — before anything is technical

Two weeks of ordinary email on the new domain. Not marketing. Not newsletters. Ordinary.

• 10 to 20 messages a day, written by a person, to people who will answer.
• Subject lines a human would type. No templates.
• When someone replies, you reply back. A thread with three or four turns is worth more than a

hundred one-way messages.

• Sign the messages normally, with a real signature and a real reply address that a person reads.

Nothing else happens this week. There is no shortcut through it and no tool that replaces it. If

you skip week 0, you will spend the next month wondering why your open rates look like a rounding

error, and copy will get blamed for a reputation problem.

The five rules that never bend

1. One send per address per day. A second send to the same person on the same day looks like a
2. Weekends off until the domain has a clean month behind it. Business mail on a Sunday is a
3. No re-sending to bounces. A hard bounce is permanent. A soft bounce gets one retry, then it
4. No purchased lists. Not this week, not at 100 a day, not ever. The reputation cost is not
5. Complaint is a stop, not a wobble. One complaint: find the address, remove it, and write down