How to do a practice run of a cold campaign

Before you ask to start, see the campaign played out day by day with nothing sent: emails each day from each address, when everyone has had email 1, when the last follow-up goes, and the first emails exactly as they would leave.

Updated 2026-10-30

A practice run plays a cold campaign out day by day without sending anything. Use it before you press Ask to start, so you know how long the campaign takes and what the first emails look like. You can run it as often as you like; nothing is saved, sent or spent.

It works for a running campaign too: then it starts from where each business really is in its sequence.

Run one

Open a cold campaign, go to Practice run and press Play it out.
Choose how many days to play out: 30 to start with, from 7 up to 120.

What it shows

Each day with something on it: how many emails go, which step each one is, and how many from each sending address.
The totals: how many businesses and how many emails.
When every business has had email 1, and when the last follow-up goes.
Each address's daily limit at the end of the run.
The first three businesses' emails, every step, exactly as they would leave: the address they go from, the version (A or B), the subject and the words, with your postal address and the way to stop under them. If Otto has not written a business's emails yet, that step says so.

The rules it follows

The practice run uses the same rules as the real sending:

the campaign's sending days;
each new address's warm-up, on a domain Otto has not sent from before: 5 emails a day, climbing over 14 sending days, first emails to confirmed mailboxes only, and not before the domain's DKIM, SPF and DMARC records are in place (see how to warm up your sending addresses);
each address's ramp after that: 30 emails a day to start, never above 50 a day in its first two weeks, then about a tenth more after a day that used most of its allowance;
the campaign's daily limit and your business's daily cap;
the waits between steps;
how businesses are split between your sending addresses and between versions.

A resting address sends nothing in the practice run, just as in the real one.

What it cannot know

Replies, bounces and unsubscribes. Each one stops a business early, so the real campaign sends fewer emails than the practice run shows, and may finish sooner.
Sending hours within a day. It counts whole days, not hours.

Warnings

The practice run tells you when:

no business would be written to: keep some found businesses, or import a list;
there is no sending address yet: add one, such as hello;
an address is resting, so it sends nothing until you resume it under Domains and mailboxes;
an address has not started its warm-up, and why (a missing DKIM, SPF or DMARC record);
an address is warming up and has nobody it may write to yet, or is still warming up at the end of the run, and how many businesses wait for it;
some businesses would still be mid-sequence at the end of the run. More sending addresses or a higher daily limit go faster.

Then

When it looks right, press Ask to start. That puts one approval in Reviews for the whole campaign, and nothing is sent until you approve it. See how to run a cold email campaign.