Why does my campaign send fewer emails than my daily limit?
Because the daily limit is only a ceiling, and something else usually stops the campaign first. The most common cause is the minimum wait between sends inside your sending hours. Next come the volume ramp on new mailboxes, each mailbox's own daily limit, and mailbox health. All of them are on the campaign's Settings tab except the mailbox limit, which is under Accounts.
Where the settings are
Open Campaigns, click the campaign, then the Settings tab. The relevant sections are When it sends, How it sends and, under Advanced, the ramp and recipient-local hours. Save at the bottom appears when you have changed something.
The limits, in the order they bite
1. Sending days, hours and timezone (When it sends). Nothing sends outside the days you tick (the default is Monday to Friday) and between the start and end hour (the default is 09:00 to 17:00) in the campaign's Timezone. The end hour has to be after the start hour.
2. Minimum wait between sends (How it sends). This is the smallest gap between two emails from the same mailbox. The default is 10 minutes. Divide your sending window by the gap and you get the most one mailbox can send in a day: an 8-hour window with a 10-minute gap is about 48 per mailbox. Multiply by the number of mailboxes on the campaign for the campaign's real ceiling. If that number is lower than your daily limit, raising the daily limit changes nothing. Shorten the gap, widen the hours or add mailboxes instead.
- Each mailbox also has its own minimum wait under Accounts. The longer of the two wins.
- Warmup shares the same mailbox, so warmup sends also count against the gap. The real figure is a little lower than the arithmetic.
- A very short gap looks machine-made to providers, so do not shrink it to zero for volume.
3. The daily limit (When it sends). The most this campaign can send per day in total, spread across all its mailboxes. The default is 30. It accepts 1 to 50,000.
4. Each mailbox's own daily campaign limit (Accounts). Every mailbox has a limit on campaign emails per day (30 by default). It is shared by every campaign that uses the mailbox, so two campaigns on one mailbox do not each get a full allowance. If you set the campaign's daily limit to 500 with two mailboxes at 30, you send at most 60.
5. The volume ramp (Advanced). See the next section.
6. Mailbox health. A mailbox with a rising bounce rate is slowed down, and a mailbox with a high one is taken off campaigns. See "Bounces slow a mailbox down" below.
7. Plan limits. On the Free plan, campaign sends are metered monthly. See Plans and limits. The free mailbox every account gets sends a small number of cold emails a day once it unlocks. See How do I get a free sending mailbox?.
Warmi on the Overview and Settings tabs does this arithmetic for you. See What the Warmi advice on a campaign means.
The volume ramp
New mailboxes should not send at full volume on day one, so the ramp raises each mailbox's daily cap gradually. The starting figures are:
- Start at: 3 emails per mailbox on the first sending day.
- Add per sending day: 1.
- Up to: 15 per mailbox per day. With those defaults a mailbox reaches full volume on its 13th sending day.
How it works:
- The ramp is on by default when you create a campaign in a project that has no mailbox yet, or that has any mailbox with fewer than 14 days of warmup. It is off by default if all your mailboxes are established, because a 15-a-day ceiling would hold a warm mailbox back below its own limit.
- A "day" means a sending day. Weekends you do not send on do not advance it.
- Pausing and resuming does not restart the ramp.
- The ramp only ever tightens. It cannot push a mailbox past its own daily limit, so a ramp ceiling above the mailbox's limit stops at the mailbox limit.
- Turn it off, or change the three numbers, under Settings > Advanced > Ramp volume up gradually. The panel previews the cap for days 1, 3, 5, 10 and 20.
Recipient-local hours
Under Settings > Advanced > Recipient-local hours you set the working hours (default 08:00 to 17:00) that apply in the lead's own timezone. This only works for leads whose country is known, such as leads pulled from Warmerly's lead database. Leads without a country, which is most CSV imports, fall back to your sending window above. Sending days are shared between the two.
This never adds volume. It only decides what time of day a send is allowed, and every cap above still applies.
Bounces slow a mailbox down
Warmerly looks at each mailbox's bounce rate over the last 7 days, once it has at least 25 sends of history. Below 2% nothing changes. From 2% the mailbox's daily campaign cap is scaled down (to 75%, then 50%, then 25% as the rate climbs) and it never drops below 1 a day. At 7% the mailbox is taken off campaigns entirely, but warmup keeps running so it can rebuild its reputation. You get an email, the mailbox shows a Recovering badge, and it returns to campaigns by itself once its health score is back up, then ramps up gently for a few days. If a mailbox's mail is being refused as spam three times in a day, it is paused from campaigns the same way and the affected leads simply retry later.
Several campaigns on the same mailboxes
Campaigns take turns. The campaign that sent least recently goes first, so a busy campaign cannot starve a quieter one. It does not balance volume: a campaign with a high daily limit still sends more than one with a low limit.
Common problems
Active, but nothing has sent for days. Usually the audience has run out, every mailbox is at its cap for the day, or the sending window has not opened in the campaign's timezone. Check the Overview tab and the Senders tab. Work through A campaign is not sending.
I raised the daily limit and nothing changed. The gap between sends is the ceiling. Read point 2 above.
Day one sent only 3 emails per mailbox. That is the ramp for a new mailbox, working as intended.