Should You Send Cold Emails From Your Primary Domain? (2024)

You should NOT send cold emails from your primary domain.

If you send cold emails from your primary domain, then you risk “burning” (blacklisting) your domain.

In this article, I will explain everything you need to know about sending cold emails and which domain to use:

• What is a primary domain?
• Why is it a bad idea to send cold emails from your primary domain?
• What is the solution? (secondary domains)
• Final thoughts

What is a primary domain?

A primary domain is the domain associated with your company’s website.

For example, I am the founder of Emailchaser. My company’s website is https://www.emailchaser.com/

My primary domain is emailchaser.com

If I was sending cold emails from my primary domain, then I would be sending them from [email protected]

Later in this article, I will explain why this is a bad idea (and what you should do instead).

Why is it a bad idea to send cold emails from your primary domain?

The reason why it is a bad idea to send cold emails from your primary domain is because you risk “burning” (blacklisting) your domain.

Email service providers (such as Gmail and Outlook) do not want people to send spam emails. If they think an email address is sending spam, then they will blacklist the domain associated with that email address.

This means that any email address associated with the blacklisted domain will automatically go to the spam folder. There is no way to fix this.

If you are not experienced with cold email, and you make a mistake (such as sending too much volume) when sending from your primary domain, then email service providers will blacklist your company’s real domain.

This means that all of your team members who have their official email accounts set up on your company’s primary domain will now be using blacklisted email addresses.

When your team members send each other emails, or even to your vendors or partners, all of their emails will go to spam (even if you aren’t sending cold emails).

What is the solution? (secondary domains)

The solution is to send cold emails from secondary domains.

This protects your primary domain, so that if something goes wrong, and an email service provider blacklists your domain, then it won’t affect your company’s real domain.

For example, if my company’s primary domain is emailchaser.com, then I will not send cold emails from this domain. Instead, I will set up the following email accounts on secondary domains:

[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
[email protected]
etc.

You can learn more about how to do this in my article How To Set Up A Domain For Cold Email. In this article, I show you how to correctly set up your secondary domains and also how to set up an email account with each domain.

I recommend that you use Emailchaser to send your cold emails because you can connect an unlimited number of secondary domains (email accounts) to scale your campaigns.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

You should not send cold emails from your primary domain.

If you do, then you risk “burning” (blacklisting) your company's real domain, which will cause all emails (including internal emails) sent from your team members to go to spam.

Instead, you should use secondary domains.

You can learn how to use secondary domains in my article How To Send Cold Emails Without Landing In Spam.