--- title: Sending safely | Lightfield description: Protect your company's email and LinkedIn accounts with the right senders, sending limits and send window, and understand the checks Lightfield runs before every send. --- How much you can send, and how to set up sending without damaging your company’s email. ## Start with who you’re emailing **People who already know you.** Lost deals, past customers, sign-ups, champions who moved, event contacts, your own product users. Send from your connected work email with the default limits. There’s nothing else to set up here. Go build a sequence. **People who have never heard of you.** This is cold outbound, and it’s the only situation that carries real risk. You can run a modest amount of cold from your connected work inbox, because Lightfield caps daily volume, spaces out sends and checks every message. Keep the numbers conservative. Move to separate sending domains when you want to send more cold than your own inbox should carry, or when you want your primary domain fully out of harm’s way. You can upload domains and mailboxes you already have and have warmed yourself. ## Why this matters Gmail and Outlook decide whether your mail reaches the inbox or spam, and they judge your whole domain, not one campaign. Send too much cold email too fast, or send to addresses that don’t exist, and they conclude your company sends spam. After that, everything from that domain starts landing in spam: campaigns, replies to customers, invoices. That’s why cold outbound at any real volume runs on separate domains. If a cold domain gets flagged, the damage stays there. ## Terms - **Sending domain.** A domain you send cold email from that isn’t your real company domain. If you’re acme.com, you might send cold from try-acme.com. If it gets burned, your real domain is untouched. - **Mailbox.** One account on a sending domain, such as . A domain usually carries two or three. Each mailbox has its own daily limit, so adding mailboxes is how you send more without pushing any one too hard. - **Warming.** A slow, growing trickle of low-stakes email from a new mailbox, so providers see steady human-looking activity before it sends anything cold. Warming happens outside Lightfield, before you upload the mailbox. - **SPF, DKIM and DMARC.** Three DNS settings that prove mail really comes from your domain. Without them, mail is likely to be rejected or sent to spam. Set them once per domain. Plan on four to six weeks of warm-up before a new domain carries full cold volume, and don’t send cold from it at all in its first couple of weeks. The clock runs whether or not you’ve started, so if you know you’ll need domains, start now and run warm plays in the meantime. ## Setting up senders Sequence sending is set up in [Settings → Sequences](https://crm.lightfield.app/crm/settings/sequences/), separately from inbox sync. Each person has a sender page listing their accounts. ### Your connected email account Connecting a mailbox in [Settings → Mail and calendar](https://crm.lightfield.app/crm/settings/mail-and-calendar/) doesn’t make it a sequence sender. On your sender page, choose **Enable for sequences** for the account. Its status then shows as **Enabled for sequences**, or **Needs reconnect** if the connection has lapsed. ### Warmed mailboxes Warmed mailboxes are secondary-domain mailboxes a sender uses for outbound volume. On a sender’s page, under **Warmed mailboxes**, choose **Upload CSV**. The file needs the columns email, password and provider (gmail or outlook). You also choose which connected account catches replies (**Replies go to**). Each uploaded mailbox is health-checked before it can send, and shows as verifying until the check passes. The check flags problems such as a failed login, a domain with no DNS records, or a missing SPF or DMARC record. Only healthy mailboxes send. You can **Re-run health check**, **Pause sender**, **Resume sender** or **Remove sender** from a mailbox’s actions menu. ### LinkedIn On your sender page, choose **Connect LinkedIn** and sign in. Only you can connect your own LinkedIn account. Then designate the account on each sequence that uses it. ## Sending limits Lightfield ships with these limits already set, in [Settings → Sequences](https://crm.lightfield.app/crm/settings/sequences/) under **Sending limits**. They’re the default for every sender and apply across all sequences. An admin can raise them up to the ceiling; nobody can go past it. | Channel | Default per day | Ceiling per day | Default gap between sends | | ----------------------- | --------------- | --------------- | ------------------------- | | Connected email account | 20 | 50 | 3 to 8 min | | Warmed mailbox (each) | 20 | 100 | 3 to 8 min | | LinkedIn invites | 10 | 30 | 5 to 10 min | | LinkedIn DMs | 20 | 60 | 5 to 10 min | You can also set limits on an individual sender (**Edit sending limits**) or a LinkedIn account (**Sending limits**), and a sequence can have its own lower cap if you want one campaign slower than the rest. **Why each number is what it is:** - **Connected email: 20.** That address is your real work email on your real domain, and it isn’t replaceable. Twenty a day is inside what a person could plausibly send by hand. Don’t raise it to push cold volume. - **Warmed mailboxes: 20 each, up to 100.** “Each” is the important word: five mailboxes at the default is 100 a day. To send more, add mailboxes rather than pushing one hard. Only raise a mailbox once it’s actually warmed. Independent guidance puts sustained safe volume nearer 20 to 30 a day per mailbox, so raise it gradually and treat the ceiling of 100 as a limit, not a target. - **LinkedIn invites: 10, up to 30.** LinkedIn meters invitations over a rolling seven days, and your real allowance can be lower for new accounts, accounts with few connections, or accounts with poor acceptance rates. The default of 10 keeps you well inside it. - **LinkedIn DMs: 20, up to 60.** A message to someone who already accepted you is far lower risk than a request to a stranger. **The gap matters as much as the daily number.** Twenty emails in four minutes and twenty spread across a day look completely different to a spam filter. Lightfield waits a random gap within the range between sends, because a fixed interval is a pattern no person produces. ### LinkedIn connection notes Connection invites go out without a note by default. A note can be up to 200 characters, or 300 if you turn on **LinkedIn Premium** for the account in its settings. By default Lightfield also limits invites with a note to 5 per rolling 30 days, a safety margin of its own; with LinkedIn Premium on, invites with a note count only against the overall invite limit. ### Should you raise anything? For almost everyone, no. The defaults are the recommendation, not a starting position. Reasonable: a mailbox that has run clean for months with bounces under 1%, raised gradually while you watch the numbers. Not reasonable: you have 2,000 people and want to finish this week. Add mailboxes, or cut the list, which will probably perform better anyway. ## Send window By default, sequences send between 9 and 5 on weekdays in your timezone. You can change the window for each sequence. Sends that fall outside it wait until it opens. Windows that run overnight (for example 10pm to 6am) aren’t supported. A sequence set to **Priority** sends its messages ahead of other queued sends. It doesn’t raise any limit or bypass the window. ## Checks Lightfield runs for you Worth knowing, so you understand what happened when one stops a message. ### Quality checks before a message sends Every message the agent writes for a sequence (email subject and body, LinkedIn DM, and connection note) is checked before it sends. A message is blocked if it contains: - **An em dash** (the long dash), anywhere in it. Em dashes read as machine-written. Hyphens and en dashes are fine. - **An unfilled placeholder**, such as `{{firstName}}`, `[Your Name]` or `[insert date]`. - **Internal Lightfield markup or record IDs** that a recipient should never see. - **Markdown formatting**: bold, headings, markdown-style links, tables or code blocks. Simple bullet lines starting with `-` or `•` are allowed. (Email bodies, DMs and notes.) - **HTML tags.** (Email bodies, DMs and notes.) Emails are also blocked if the body is empty or the subject has a line break, and a connection note is blocked if it’s longer than the account allows. When a check fails, the agent rewrites the message and tries again within the same step. If it still can’t produce a message that passes, the step fails and that contact’s enrollment pauses. A paused enrollment doesn’t restart on its own: ask the agent to check it and resume it. The checks apply to text the agent writes. If you edit a draft yourself in [For review](/automations/how-for-review-works/index.md), your edits aren’t checked, so read them before you approve. ### Plain text Sequence emails are written as plain text. Paste links as plain URLs rather than hyperlinked text. Each sender has a **Signature** in Settings → Sequences that’s added to the end of sequence emails; warmed mailboxes always use it. For connected accounts, **Rich signature on connected accounts** uses your Mail and calendar signature instead. Many teams keep the signature for cold email plain, with no links, logos or images, because graphics and links in a signature can read as marketing automation. ### Bounces and undeliverable addresses Lightfield checks each address when a contact is enrolled and again when sending. Addresses that fail, or that have bounced before, end the enrollment as **Undeliverable**. Hard bounces are suppressed so they aren’t retried. Catch-all domains accept mail for any address, so a check can’t confirm a specific mailbox exists. By default those recipients are removed from sequences. Turning on **Send to unverifiable emails** under **Deliverability** sends to them anyway, at the cost of more bounces, and affects the whole workspace. If a sender’s hard bounces in the last 24 hours cross a safety threshold, Lightfield pauses that sender automatically and marks it **Paused after bounces**. It stays paused until someone resumes it, which triggers a fresh health check. ### LinkedIn limits When LinkedIn refuses invitations because an account hit its limit, Lightfield pauses every active sequence sending from that account and notifies your workspace admins. The sequences don’t resume on their own. Wait about seven days, then resume them, and consider lowering the account’s daily invite limit. If LinkedIn refused because of a short-term rate limit instead, the wait is about 24 hours. ## Health thresholds to watch These thresholds are industry guidance, not Lightfield rules. Your own bounce and complaint data always overrides them. **Bounce rate: keep it under 1%.** | Rate | What it means | | -------- | ------------------------------------------------ | | Under 1% | Healthy | | 1 to 2% | Watch it closely | | 2 to 5% | Reputation is degrading. Stop and clean the list | | Above 5% | Stop everything | Hard bounces (the address doesn’t exist) are the damaging kind. Soft bounces such as a full mailbox barely matter. Check per mailbox, not just per campaign: a campaign averaging 1.4% can hide one mailbox at 6%. Verify every address before the first send. **Spam complaints: keep them under 0.1%.** Google publishes 0.3% as the point where it acts and recommends staying under 0.1%. **LinkedIn acceptance rate: keep it above about 30%.** Below that, LinkedIn may tighten your limit. Paying for Sales Navigator buys better search, not more invitations. ## What it costs to get this wrong - **Email:** everything from a burned domain lands in spam, including replies to real customers, and a badly burned domain may never fully recover. - **LinkedIn:** exceeding LinkedIn’s limits can restrict the account, and repeated restrictions can lead to a suspension. Both take far longer to earn back than to lose. ## If something goes wrong mid-campaign **The copy or setup is wrong** (a bad phrase, the wrong sender, a broken detail): fix it with the agent and publish the change. Contacts pick it up at their next step. Pause the sequence first only if you need sending to stop while you fix it. **Deliverability is slipping:** isolate rather than stopping everything. Pause only the affected sender, find where the bounces cluster (often one data source or one recipient provider), re-verify that part of the list, and resume from a healthy sender on the clean part. As a rule of thumb, rest the affected mailbox for two to three weeks before using it for cold again. ## The case for sending less Smaller campaigns tend to reply at a much higher rate than large sends. Two hundred well-researched people with a real reason for each message will usually beat two thousand who matched a filter, without extra mailboxes and without risking a domain. If you’re choosing between adding mailboxes and cleaning your list, clean the list. ## Checklist **Emailing people who know you:** - Sending from your connected work email, with **Enable for sequences** on - Default limits left alone **Sending cold:** - Low volume from your connected inbox; real volume from separate domains - Cold sending kept off the domain your customer mail runs on - Domains warmed before use, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC set - Every address verified - Bounces watched per mailbox - Defaults left alone unless you have a specific reason **Using LinkedIn:** - Invites at the default of 10 a day - Acceptance rate watched - Invitations reserved for people you can’t email - No links in a first message ## Next steps - [Building sequences](/sequences/building-sequences/index.md): senders, steps and testing. - [Running and troubleshooting](/sequences/running-and-troubleshooting/index.md): read campaign performance and fix common problems.