Apexium Field Notes · Classified SOP
DOC-OUTBOUND
SYSTEM
Outbound
ARCHETYPE
System Teardown
STATUS
Live
LAST AUDITED
2026-07-02
How We Architected Our Own Outbound Stack — Domains, Warming, and the Funnel Math
This is the outbound system we run for ourselves — not a client case study. Full disclosure rights, real settings, and the failure that forced us to rewrite the ramp rules.
14 min · Window Jan 6 – Jun 27, 2026 · n=18,420
01 · Infrastructure
Sending stack, not a single inbox
Primary brand domain apexium.us never sends cold. Outreach runs on 6 secondary domains × 3 mailboxes = 18 inboxes, capped at 32 cold sends/mailbox/day (~480 cluster daily at steady state).
The copy that runs on this stack is dissected separately — the 4-sentence script that killed the brochure template.
02 · Auth & DNS
SPF, DKIM, DMARC — aligned to 2026 bulk rules
Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft treat 5,000+/day as bulk: SPF + DKIM + DMARC (min p=none), From: alignment, spam complaints under 0.3% (we target <0.1%). We run p=quarantine on every sending domain.
- SPF
- v=SPF1 include:_spf.google.com include:spf.protection.outlook.com -all
- DKIM
- 2048-bit keys on every sending domain (Google Workspace + Microsoft 365)
- DMARC
- v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; pct=100; rua=mailto:dmarc@apexium.us; fo=1
- Alignment
- Relaxed DKIM alignment on From: domain; SPF flattened under 10 lookups
03 · Warming ramp
Conservative ramp — scale horizontally
Interactive · Domain warming
7-week ramp per mailbox
Drag the week scrubber. Cold volume never jumps more than ~8 sends/week. Warm traffic stays on after production so reputation doesn't decay on quiet days.
Week 7 of 7
32 cold+6 warm/ mailbox / day
Cold sends
32
Warm sends
6
Operator note · W7Production cap. Scale via more mailboxes, not higher caps.
| Week | Cold | Warm | Cluster daily* |
|---|---|---|---|
| W1 | 0 | 8 | 0 cold |
| W2 | 0 | 14 | 0 cold |
| W3 | 5 | 12 | 90 cold |
| W4 | 12 | 10 | 216 cold |
| W5 | 20 | 8 | 360 cold |
| W6 | 28 | 7 | 504 cold |
| W7 | 32 | 6 | 576 cold |
*Cluster daily = cold × 18 mailboxes at that week's cap.
04 · Enrichment waterfall
What fills which gap
No single tool owns the list. Each step only fills the gap the previous step left open — then PipeFlow QA gates anything that still looks like a role account or competitor.
Step 01
Apollo.io
Fills
Firmographics, titles, verified emails
Still missing
Stale emails on mid-market accounts
Step 02
Clay + Clearbit
Fills
Tech stack, funding, headcount deltas
Still missing
Personal emails still missing
Step 03
Hunter / Findymail
Fills
Catch-all resolution + SMTP verify
Still missing
Role accounts filtered out
Step 04
Manual QA (PipeFlow)
Fills
ICP score, do-not-contact, competitor flags
Still missing
Human bottleneck — capped at ~400/day
05 · Daily monitors
Pause thresholds, not vibes
Interactive · Deliverability monitors
What we track every morning
Select a metric. Thresholds map to Google/Yahoo/Microsoft bulk-sender rules (spam < 0.3%, target < 0.1%) plus our internal pause gates.
Spam complaint rate
Source · Google Postmaster
Healthy band
< 0.10%
Auto-pause
≥ 0.20%
When a pause fires, Outreach sequences freeze for that domain cluster, warm traffic continues, and an agent opens a PipeFlow incident. We do not “send through” a yellow Postmaster day — that is how we burned goapexium.com in week three.
06 · Funnel math
Sent → opened → replied → booked
Interactive · Funnel math
Click a stage to inspect the conversion
Sample: 18,420 sends · Jan 6 – Jun 27, 2026
Stage detail
Booked
214(1.16% of sent)
1.16% of sends → booked call. Of positive replies, 43% convert to a calendar hold when a dedicated agent owns follow-up within 4 hours.
Vs. 2026 industry
Avg reply ~3.4% · avg booked ~1.1% of sends. Our positive reply 2.7% sits in the “good” band without claiming top-decile vanity numbers.
Open rates are directional (Apple MPP). The numbers we manage the system on: delivery 97.6%, reply 4.3%, positive reply 2.7%, booked 1.16% of sends, spam complaints 0.06%.
07 · What failed first
Week 3 domain burn on goapexium.com
Incident
We jumped from 8 → 35 cold sends/mailbox in four days after a “healthy” warm score. Spam complaints hit 0.28% in 72 hours. Gmail began soft-throttling the whole domain cluster sharing the same SPF include pattern.
Fix locked in
Retired goapexium.com for 21 days, split SPF includes per provider, capped cold at +5/week, and required dual-signal green (Postmaster spam < 0.1% AND seed inbox ≥ 85%) before any ramp step.
Next step
Want this audit run on your domains?
We review DNS, warming posture, mailbox math, and pause thresholds — then tell you what to fix before you scale volume. Narrow scope. No generic strategy deck.