Three Workspace mailboxes on iexdg-team.com, connected to Instantly for warming, sized to carry the first cold outreach send in early June. This document is the runbook: what each mailbox is for, how it was wired, and how to add a fourth one cleanly when the time comes.
All three mailboxes are connected to Instantly and warming. Domain DNS is clean (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX all green via Google). Dr. DNicole answered the three open gates on May 15: suppression list empty for now, sender personas locked (see section 2), per-batch copy review for the first 30 days. The realistic first executive cold send is the week of June 8, set by mailbox warmup runway, not May 27. What remains is on our side: the target list, the cold-email copy in two persona voices, and wiring the Instantly campaign.
Campaign 05 is the Tier 2 cold-email channel inside the Outreach Command Center. The target is associations and mid-size organizations in the $100M to $400M revenue band where the buyer is a CHRO or HR Director and the front-door offer is the Leadership Culture Intelligence Session at $15,000. The expected reply rate on signal-anchored cold email is 5 to 18 percent.
Cold email cannot run from iexdg.com. The primary domain protects warm replies, referrals, and her existing contacts. A dedicated secondary domain absorbs all cold traffic so any deliverability drag stays isolated. That secondary is iexdg-team.com, bought May 11 from Namecheap, DNS-cleaned May 12, with three real Google Workspace user accounts living on it.
| Mailbox | Display name | Role | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| info@iexdg-team.com | Robert Dove | General inquiries, inbound, routing, reply handling. Per Dr. DNicole's May 15 Gate 6 decision, info@ is not a primary executive sender. Warming since May 13. | Warming |
| partnerships@iexdg-team.com | partnerships iexdg | Associations, vendors, chambers, sponsors, procurement. The partnerships-function voice, not Dr. DNicole's personal voice. Warming since May 18. | Warming |
| drdnicole@iexdg-team.com | Denean Fields | Executive, CHRO, superintendent, and government outreach in Dr. DNicole's high-touch leader-to-leader voice. The primary Campaign 05 cold sender per Gate 6. Warming since May 20. | Warming |
Each mailbox sends from its own address and warms independently in Instantly. They share the same domain reputation through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records on iexdg-team.com, so a strong sending pattern on one helps the others.
Google has not let third-party tools sign in with a regular Workspace password since 2022. When a tool like Instantly needs to send mail through Gmail, it asks the user for an App Password. An App Password is a 16-character secret that Google issues only to accounts with 2-Step Verification turned on. It is single-purpose, can be revoked from the account at any time, and is the only mechanism Google currently supports for IMAP and SMTP from outside its own apps. Each mailbox needs its own App Password. They cannot be shared.
If a Workspace account loses 2-Step Verification, every App Password issued under it stops working instantly. That is the most common reason an Instantly mailbox suddenly stops sending. The fix is always: confirm 2SV is on, generate a new App Password, paste it into Instantly.
Five Workspace steps, then one command. Mirrors what we ran for info@ on May 13, partnerships@ on May 18, and drdnicole@ on May 20.
Directory, Users, Add new user. Email goes on iexdg-team.com. License must be a real seat, not a free alias. A real seat is what lets the account hold its own 2SV and its own App Password.
Open a fresh incognito window. Go to accounts.google.com, sign in as the new mailbox with the temp password set during creation. Accept any prompts, set a real password if asked.
myaccount.google.com/security, 2-Step Verification, turn on, finish the SMS or app verification.
myaccount.google.com/apppasswords, name it Instantly, Create. Google shows a 16-character password in a box.
Open source/secrets/workspace_app_passwords.txt on Robert's machine and add a new line in the existing format. Update the status header to reflect the new total.
newmailbox@iexdg-team.com: abcd efgh ijkl mnop
cd Documents\Belay\IEXDG\source\scripts\automations python instantly_provisioner.py
The provisioner is idempotent. It skips mailboxes already in Instantly and only touches the new one. It does three things: adds the account via IMAP and SMTP, configures warmup settings, enables warmup. If Instantly returns a 404 on the warmup enable call, wait 45 seconds and re-run the same command. That is a known eventual-consistency lag in the Instantly v2 API, not an error.
Verify clean state:
python instantly_provisioner.py --verify
Every mailbox should print True True ok.
If you ever need to wire a mailbox up directly in the Instantly UI instead of through the provisioner, these are the exact values to type. They are the same for every iexdg-team.com mailbox.
| IMAP Host | imap.gmail.com |
| IMAP Port | 993 |
| IMAP Username | the full mailbox email |
| IMAP Password | the 16-character App Password |
| SMTP Host | smtp.gmail.com |
| SMTP Port | 465 (SSL) |
| SMTP Username | the full mailbox email |
| SMTP Password | the 16-character App Password |
To prove an App Password works before touching the Instantly form:
python -c "import imaplib; m=imaplib.IMAP4_SSL('imap.gmail.com',993); print(m.login('YOUR@iexdg-team.com','xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx'))"
A working password returns ('OK', [b'YOUR@iexdg-team.com authenticated (Success)']). Anything else, the password is bad or the account is not real.
Three records on iexdg-team.com decide whether cold email from any of the three mailboxes reaches the inbox or the spam folder. They are set once at the domain level, then every mailbox inherits them.
All three were verified clean by direct DNS lookup on May 12 and re-confirmed on May 20.
Dr. DNicole closed the three decision gates on May 15. The remaining work is on our side, and the realistic first executive send is the week of June 8, paced by mailbox warmup:
When the user states an exact email or identifier, verify it against the live Google Workspace directory (admin.google.com, Users) before correcting them based on what is in a local file. Stale files lie. The user is closer to the live system than the captured artifact.
The May-13 secrets file and the May-18 ledger named the third mailbox dnicole@iexdg-team.com. When Robert typed drdnicole@iexdg-team.com at the start of this session, the file was trusted over his input. Two fresh App Passwords were burned against the wrong username before the admin Directory check showed the real user is Denean Fields at drdnicole@iexdg-team.com. The dnicole@ account does not exist.
The lesson is baked into memory/iexdg_drdnicole_mailbox_username_correction_may20.md and indexed at the top of MEMORY.md so future sessions cannot miss it.