How to set up a cold outreach domain and mailbox in Zinn® Campaigns

Cold Outreach sends your B2B sequences through mailboxes you own, never through our servers and never from the domain your newsletters use. This guide shows how to connect your own sending domain: you give cold email a domain of its own, create a mailbox on it, publish its records and connect the mailbox to Zinn® Campaigns.

You do this once for each outreach domain. In your dashboard open Email marketing, then Cold outreach. The Set up your outreach domain card there lists the same steps.

1. Buy a separate domain for outreach

Register a domain close to your brand that you use only for outreach, for example getyourbrand.com beside yourbrand.com. Never use your main domain or the domain you send newsletters from. If a prospect marks a cold email as spam, only the outreach domain's reputation is affected, and your customers keep receiving your newsletters and invoices.

2. Create a mailbox on the domain

Create a mailbox on the new domain with a provider that lets you log in over SMTP and IMAP with a password or an app password. These work today:

• Google Workspace or Gmail
• Zoho Mail (choose your data centre when you connect)
• Yahoo Mail, iCloud Mail and Fastmail
• Any other mailbox with SMTP and IMAP, such as the email that comes with your hosting. Your provider gives you the server names and ports.

We send through SMTP and read replies through IMAP, so a reply stops the sequence for that prospect.

Microsoft 365 and Outlook.com mailboxes cannot be connected. Microsoft accepts only its own sign-in for them, not an app password over SMTP and IMAP. Use one of the providers above for your outreach domain.

You can connect as many mailboxes as you like, across one domain or several. Sends are spread across them, and each mailbox keeps to its own daily cap.

3. Publish SPF, DKIM and DMARC

At the company that hosts the domain's DNS, publish the three records your mailbox provider gives you:

• SPF: a TXT record on the domain naming the servers allowed to send for it.
• DKIM: the signing key your provider generates, usually a TXT or CNAME record under ._domainkey.
• DMARC: a TXT record at _dmarc that tells receivers what to do with mail that fails the other two. v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:you@yourdomain is a safe start.

Without these, mailbox providers are far more likely to send your emails to spam or reject them.

After you connect a mailbox, press Domain records on its row. It shows each record we found on the domain and, for any that is missing or wrong, the exact value to add. The check runs again each time the mailbox is checked, and the status column shows whether the domain passed.

4. Create an app password

An app password is a separate password for one program, so your normal password is never shared.

• Google Workspace or Gmail: turn on 2-Step Verification for the account, then create an app password for the mailbox in the Google account's security settings. If your Workspace administrator has turned app passwords off, they need to allow them first.
• Zoho Mail, Yahoo Mail, iCloud Mail and Fastmail each have an app password setting in their account security pages. The Connect form links to it in a new tab.
• Other mailboxes: use the mailbox's password, or an app password if your provider offers one.

5. Connect the mailbox

In Cold outreach, open the Connect form:

1. Choose the Mailbox provider. For a listed provider we fill in the SMTP and IMAP servers for you; for Other mailbox (SMTP and IMAP) enter the servers and ports your provider gives you.
2. Enter the email address, the sender name and the app password. The username is usually the email address.
3. Press Connect and check. We log in over SMTP and IMAP and read the domain's records. A mailbox that logs in shows Working. One that cannot shows Not working: correct the password or the servers and press Check again.

Before you send

New mailboxes should start slowly. Each mailbox starts with a daily cap of 30 emails; use Limits on its row to raise it gradually over a few weeks while replies come in and bounces stay low. Import your prospects from a CSV: country and B2B rules are applied to every row, and anyone who has opted out is suppressed before a single email goes out.