Instantly warm-up emails landing in Gmail spam
I’m looking for feedback from people who have used both Apollo and Instantly for inbox warm-up and outbound campaigns.
I used Apollo for about a year to warm up inboxes and run email campaigns. After building up a decent dataset there, I decided to start warming up some new inboxes in Instantly and test campaigns from there.
One of the first things I noticed is that some of Instantly’s own warm-up emails are already landing in spam in Gmail.
Isn’t that a pretty bad signal?
My thinking is: if the platform’s warm-up emails themselves are not reliably landing in the inbox, doesn’t that suggest the mailbox/domain reputation is already struggling, or that the warm-up network quality may be questionable?
The other thing I noticed is the sending pattern. Apollo warm-up emails seem to be scattered naturally throughout the day. Instantly warm-up emails, at least in my inboxes so far, seem more clustered around specific times of the day/week. That also feels odd to me because I would expect warm-up activity to mimic natural sending and receiving patterns, not come in noticeable bursts.
I didn’t really see either issue with Apollo. With Apollo, the warm-up emails generally seemed to hit the inbox consistently in Gmail, and the timing pattern looked more distributed.
The flip side is that Apollo’s warm-up has its own issue: Apollo support confirmed that their warm-up emails are sent through Apollo’s own infrastructure rather than directly from the connected mailboxes. In my case, that seems to create SPF/spoofing-type problems with Microsoft 365 recipients, even though the connected inboxes themselves are on Google Workspace.
So I’m trying to understand how others think about this tradeoff:
If Instantly warm-up emails are landing in Gmail spam, is that a serious red flag or just normal early warm-up behavior?
Has anyone else seen Instantly warm-up emails go to spam at the beginning and then recover over time?
Have others noticed Instantly warm-up emails clustering around certain times rather than being evenly distributed?
Is Apollo’s warm-up actually better for Gmail inbox placement, despite the Microsoft 365/SPF issue?
Does the fact that Apollo warm-up does not send directly from the connected mailbox make the warm-up less useful as a signal?
For people running serious outbound, do you trust platform warm-up at all anymore, or are you mostly relying on clean infrastructure, gradual sending patterns, manual engagement, and campaign quality?