Instantly.ai tutorial: set up your account and connect your mailboxes

Instantly (instantly.ai) is a cold email platform: you connect the mailboxes that will send your emails, it warms them up, sends your sequences from all of them and gathers the replies in one inbox. This Instantly AI tutorial covers the set-up, click by click: the account, the plan, the mailboxes, warm-up, the optional tracking domain and the Unibox.

Instantly was the first cold email tool I used, and I have found no reason to change. It is straightforward, and it has the settings that keep your emails out of spam, once you have found the right recipe. Most of that recipe happens before the first email goes out, in the steps below.

Writing and launching the campaign itself is the next tutorial, Instantly campaign setup, and my B2B cold emailing guide shows where both fit in the whole process. Menu names are those of Instantly at the time of writing (October 2026); if a label has moved since, Instantly’s help centre (help.instantly.ai) shows the current one.

What you need before you start

Instantly sends from mailboxes you connect to it, so a few things come first:

• Sending mailboxes on secondary domains, never on the domain of your company’s real inbox. My guide to cold email infrastructure explains how many domains and mailboxes to buy and what each one can send a day.
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC records on every sending domain. For mailboxes you bring yourself, they live at your DNS host, not in Instantly: my tutorial on how to set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC shows how to add them.
• The right access: an administrator account for Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, or each mailbox’s password for any other provider.
• A payment card for the plan.

Your list of leads can wait. Warm-up takes a few weeks, which leaves time to build the list and verify it.

The provider decides how a mailbox connects:

As for which provider to pick: in my experience, Microsoft works very well for cold email but is tricky to set up, and Google is worse. The one I encourage is Spacemail, the email service of Spaceship, the registrar Namecheap built; my comparison of the best email providers for cold email goes through the reasons. Check Spaceship’s rules on cold email first, though: step 3 explains why.

Step 1: create your Instantly account

Go to instantly.ai and create your account with an address you read every day, such as your own work address: the login and the sending mailboxes are separate things, and the mailboxes are connected in step 3.

Instantly keeps everything in a workspace: the connected mailboxes, the campaigns, the leads and the Unibox. Name it after the business the campaigns are for.

Step 2: choose an Outreach plan

Instantly calls its cold email plans Outreach plans. At the time of writing (October 2026) there are three, plus a custom Enterprise plan, and every one includes unlimited email accounts and unlimited warm-up. You pay for the contacts you upload and the emails you send, not for the mailboxes you connect.

Instantly bills in US dollars, so the pound figures move with the exchange rate; Instantly’s pricing page has the current prices and limits. Growth also caps sending at 5,000 emails a month, enough for a first test on one segment from a few mailboxes. You reach that cap quickly: ten mailboxes sending 30 emails each per working day already make about 6,300 emails a month, so Hypergrowth is the usual next step. Lead data (SuperSearch) and the CRM are sold separately, and this tutorial needs neither.

Unlimited mailboxes matter more than they seem. The Pilotech campaigns I run go out from 30 addresses, and on any Outreach plan the 30th mailbox costs nothing more than the first. If you are still choosing a tool, my comparison of Instantly vs Smartlead vs lemlist puts their pricing models side by side.

Step 3: connect your sending mailboxes

In the left-hand menu, open Email Accounts and click Add New. The same button sells Instantly’s own ready-made mailboxes (its done-for-you and pre-warmed accounts). This tutorial connects the ones you already have, so choose to connect existing accounts. Instantly then asks which provider the mailbox uses: Google, Microsoft, or any other provider through IMAP and SMTP. Each route needs its own preparation, described below.

Google Workspace: mark Instantly as trusted, then sign in

On Google Workspace, an administrator first tells Google that Instantly may access the mailboxes:

1. In Instantly, choose the Google option and copy the client ID it shows.
2. In the Google Admin console, go to Security, Access and data control, API controls, then Manage Third-Party App Access.
3. Add a new app, find it with the client ID, select Instantly and set its access to Trusted. Instantly OAuth v1 then appears in your list of configured apps, with Trusted access.
4. Back in Instantly, sign in with the mailbox you are connecting and allow access.

The admin part is done once; the sign-in, once per mailbox. If Google’s window offers the wrong account, choose Use another account or open Instantly in a private window. Since January 2025, IMAP access, which Instantly needs, is always on in Gmail; if a connection still fails, ask the administrator whether IMAP is blocked for the organisation. Instantly’s Google guide has the details.

Microsoft 365: switch on Authenticated SMTP first

Before Instantly can send from a Microsoft 365 mailbox, SMTP authentication must be switched on for that mailbox:

1. In the Microsoft 365 admin centre, go to Users, then Active users, and select the mailbox.
2. Open the Mail tab and click Manage email apps.
3. Tick Authenticated SMTP, check that IMAP is ticked as well (Instantly needs both) and click Save changes.
4. Wait about an hour. Instantly’s help asks for this delay, because Microsoft takes a while to apply the change.
5. In Instantly, choose the Microsoft option, sign in with that mailbox and accept the permissions it asks for.

Microsoft accounts connect one at a time: Instantly has no bulk connection for them, so set aside the time if you have many. Microsoft’s page on SMTP AUTH explains the setting, and warns that it is disabled in organisations that use security defaults; if yours does, changing that is a security decision for whoever manages your Microsoft 365.

Spacemail and other providers: IMAP and SMTP

For any other provider, choose the IMAP and SMTP option and fill in both halves of the form. For Spacemail, the values from Spaceship’s help are:

First and last name:  the sender's real name
Email:                you@your-sending-domain.co.uk
Username:             the full email address (IMAP and SMTP)
Password:             the mailbox password
IMAP host:            mail.spacemail.com
IMAP port:            993 (SSL)
SMTP host:            mail.spacemail.com
SMTP port:            465 (SSL)

IMAP and SMTP access is on by default for Spacemail mailboxes; if Instantly cannot connect, check that it has not been switched off in Spacemail Manager. These values come from Spaceship’s help centre, and my Spacemail setup tutorial covers creating the mailboxes.

Step 4: set the sender name, signature and daily limit

Click a connected mailbox in Email Accounts to open its settings. Three of them deserve a minute before warm-up starts:

• Sender name: a real person’s first and last name, the person prospects will call. For Pilotech, the emails were signed by the founder, with his phone number in the email.
• Signature: plain text only, with a name, a company and a phone number. No logo and no link, for the same reason my emails have neither: plain text without links protects delivery.
• Daily sending limit: how many campaign emails this mailbox may send a day. Start in single digits and raise it week by week. Instantly’s own guides suggest about 30 a day per mailbox once its reputation is established, the figure my infrastructure guide uses to size a set-up.

Step 5: switch on warm-up and leave it running

Warm-up is a period in which a new mailbox exchanges ordinary emails with other real mailboxes, so that inbox providers learn to trust it before it sends any cold email. Instantly includes it on every plan, for every mailbox, and runs it for you.

1. In Email Accounts, click the flame icon on a mailbox’s row to start its warm-up. To switch on several at once, select them and use the three-dot menu.
2. Do not expect activity straight away: Instantly schedules warm-up emails at midnight UTC, so a mailbox switched on today starts after the next midnight UTC.
3. Open a mailbox’s settings to see its warm-up section: how many warm-up emails it sends a day, how fast that number rises and how often the exchanges get a reply.
4. Leave it on. Warm-up does not stop when campaigns start: it carries on in the background.

For how long and with which numbers, MLK Leadhunters’ guide to email warm-up has the answer: two weeks as the minimum for a new domain, three to be safe, four for a domain registered the same month, and the settings that matter. Settings like these are a large part of why I have stayed with Instantly.

The exception is a provider that forbids automated warm-up, as Spaceship does (see step 3): leave warm-up off on those mailboxes unless the provider has agreed to it in writing.

Step 6: add a custom tracking domain, only if you track

Open and click tracking go through a tracking domain: an invisible image counts opens, and redirected links count clicks. By default those links use a domain Instantly shares between its users; a custom tracking domain replaces it with a subdomain of your own sending domain.

I skip this step. My emails are plain text with no links, so there is no tracking image and nothing to click, and tracking stays off. If you email French businesses, there is a legal reason as well: in a recommendation published in April 2026, France’s regulator, the CNIL, says open-tracking pixels in marketing emails need the recipient’s prior consent. If you do track, add this CNAME record on each sending domain, at your DNS host:

Type:   CNAME
Host:   inst
Value:  prox.itrackly.com

Then, in Instantly:

1. Open the mailbox’s settings, switch on the custom tracking domain and enter inst.your-sending-domain.co.uk.
2. Click Check Status. Once the record is found, Instantly shows CNAME Verified; a DNS change can take 24 to 72 hours to spread, so check again later if it is not found straight away.

Step 7: check the Unibox, where replies land

The Unibox is Instantly’s single inbox: replies to your campaigns from every connected mailbox land there, so nobody has to open 30 mailboxes one by one. You can filter it by campaign or by mailbox, answer from it and mark each lead’s status, interested or not.

Decide now who answers. In my clients’ campaigns, I do everything except the replies: those go to the client. On the Pilotech Teknopoint campaigns, written replies went straight to the founder, who answered them from his own inbox, and many prospects, architects especially, called instead of replying: a call fits a busy day better than a written answer. The Unibox does not show everything, so count the calls too.

The simplest end-to-end test comes with your first campaign: add your own address as a lead, reply to the email you receive and check that your reply appears in the Unibox.

After this Instantly AI tutorial: the checklist before your first campaign

Before you launch anything, check that:

1. Every sending domain has its SPF, DKIM and DMARC records.
2. Every mailbox appears in Email Accounts with no connection error.
3. Warm-up has been running for two to three weeks on every mailbox, within each provider’s rules.
4. Each mailbox has a real sender name and a plain-text signature.
5. Tracking is off, or the custom tracking domain shows CNAME Verified.
6. Someone is in charge of the Unibox, and the phone number in your emails gets answered.
7. Your list is verified. I clean mine with Reoon.

Then write and schedule the sequence with my Instantly campaign setup tutorial: three short plain-text emails at most, with your phone number in them. In my campaigns, the first result usually comes within 36 hours of launch, and the Pilotech campaigns brought 15 new clients in a year.

If you would rather not handle domains, DNS records and warm-up yourself, this whole set-up is what my cold email practice, MLK Leadhunters, does for clients: everything except the replies, which stay with you.