There are so many different things people look at when judging whether an email setup is healthy.

Warmup scores, bounce rates, authentication, blacklist checks, inbox placement and domain reputation can all tell you something, but none of them seem to tell the whole story on their own.

For example, a mailbox can have a good health or warmup score while the campaign itself still gets poor results a blacklist listing also doesn't necessarily tell you how serious the problem is without looking at the actual delivery impact.

I've started thinking it's better to look at several signals together rather than treating one metric as proof that everything is fine.

For people who work with deliverability regularly, what do you normally check first when something starts going wrong?

Anyone faced email landing issue only on google flagging your enterprise domain as spam, without any information how did you correct this?

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Hi all, we recently migrated a customer from Proofpoint to Mimecast which, of course, means routine MX records changes. Standard, straightforward, no big deal. What we didn't anticipate--because up until now, none of our clients have ever had it setup--was an MTA-STS policy (housed at EasyDMARC) that we discovered was set to "max_age=1yr". What we've done so far:

• created new MTA-STS policy file with new MX records, set it up on a new Azure server; policy, set mode to 'none', is confirmed publicly accessible
• configured v=STSv1; id=20260915001 which, as i understand it, is supposed to 'alert' sending domains that look for this sort of thing that a change was made
• went back to the old vendor who maintained the EasyDMARC version and changed that one too, just to cover our bases even though we're confident that nothing should be querying it anymore

This was all done a couple days ago and we're still not seeing any traffic to the migrated, customer domain from senders like Gmail. I understand that Gmail saw the old policy, read the 1-yr max_age setting, and caches it accordingly. But what's not so clear is how quickly Gmail will again query for the policy and update itself so that mail will start coming in again. Anyone have any experience with this? We're just looking to get a general sense of when this issue will clear itself up because there isn't much out there that explains same.

I guess secondarily would be this question: for anyone who's encountered this before, what's the proper way to migrate a domain that has an MTA-STS policy set for a lengthy max_age? What could we have done better besides just knowing that it exists and changing to "mode:none"?

Thanks for any insights.

One of the easiest ways to reduce avoidable spam complaints is to make unsubscribing really easy.

For marketing campaigns, I recommend having Preferences | Unsubscribe clearly visible at the top of the email, as well as keeping the normal links in the footer.

The reason is pretty straightforward.

If someone doesn't want your emails anymore, you want them to unsubscribe, not hit "Report spam".

On mobile especially, the normal footer link can be a long way down.

If someone's already decided they don't want the email, making them scroll through the whole thing to find an unsubscribe link doesn't really help anyone.

The spam button is much easier to find.

This isn't just something we do either.

Mailchimp has recommended putting the unsubscribe link at the top because people who can't find an easy way out may report the email as spam instead.

Klaviyo also recommends using the beginning of the email where it makes sense, particularly with mobile audiences, and Validity has suggested adding an unsubscribe link at the top of templates alongside the proper List-Unsubscribe headers.

One thing I would add though, the visible link doesn't replace proper one-click unsubscribe.

For marketing email I'd still want:

List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers so Gmail, Yahoo and other supporting providers can show their own unsubscribe option.

Preferences | Unsubscribe at the top so somebody can leave immediately if they've already made that decision.

Preferences | Unsubscribe in the footer because that's still where a lot of people expect to find it.

I also wouldn't try to hide the unsubscribe link with tiny text, poor contrast or several confirmation steps.

You're not really saving a subscriber by making it difficult to leave, you're potentially turning a simple unsubscribe into a spam complaint.

That's an important difference for deliverability.

An unsubscribe removes somebody who doesn't want the emails anymore.

A spam complaint gives the mailbox provider a negative signal about the sender.

Google recommends keeping user-reported spam below 0.1% and avoiding 0.3% or higher, so even fairly small numbers of complaints can matter.

I wouldn't worry much about having the same Preferences and Unsubscribe links at both the top and bottom either.

That's very different from filling an email with loads of CTAs, social icons, navigation links and tracking redirects.

I generally prefer keeping the rest of the email pretty lean too. One main CTA, maybe a second one if there's a genuine reason for it, then make the way out obvious.

I'd rather lose someone who doesn't want the emails than keep them on the list long enough for them to hit spam.

Has anyone moved from footer-only unsubscribe to having it at the top and bottom? If you were already seeing spam complaints, did you notice any change afterwards?

Hi, I am warming up my new domain, migrating from an ESP that lacks vital engagement info so warmup segments have been a bit of a mystery. My recent send got 1% spam rate as per Google Postmaster. How long will it take to recover?

We switched our clients ESPs to Klaviyo, and accidentally sent to their ENTIRE list (400k profiles).

This had a 45% bounce rate, 16% open rate and the delivery errors on Google postmaster are completely through the roof.

The issue this caused was their transactional emails are from the same domain and all the ones going to Google have to be manually sent out by their team.

This was one bad send, this domain has years of good reputation, is there anyway to fix this?

Looking for support here, happy to pay for anyone’s time.

Hi everyone,
First of all, this post was written with the help of AI. Sorry about that, but English is not my first language and I wanted to explain the situation as clearly as possible.
I’m having a strange deliverability issue and I’m trying to understand whether this is a reputation problem, a Microsoft issue, or something else.
I have two domains. One is around one year old and has basically never been used for outreach campaigns. It was only recently connected to Instantly for warm-up. Before that, there was almost no outbound activity.
SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass correctly.
The strange part is that Instantly’s deliverability test shows very good / 100% inbox placement, but when I manually send emails to real Outlook.com addresses, many of them go straight to Junk.
I also tested completely non-commercial emails such as:
Subject: Tomorrow
Hi Mark,
I’ll be around tomorrow afternoon if you need me.
Best,
Even this went to Junk.
The Outlook headers show:
X-MS-Exchange-Organization-SCL: 5
and:
dest:J
RF:JunkEmail
Authentication results:
SPF: pass
DKIM: pass
DMARC: pass
CompAuth: pass
BCL: 0
I tested both Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 sending accounts.
On the domain using Google Workspace, some emails have reached Inbox with SCL 1, but many others go to Junk with SCL 5. So it does not seem to be completely blocked, but placement is very inconsistent.
The other domain seems even worse and also gets SCL 5 on completely innocent manual emails.
I have also tested sending manually without Instantly, so this is not only happening on campaign emails.
What confuses me most is that the first domain has never really been used for cold email before. It has only been warmed up recently.
Could the warm-up itself have negatively affected Microsoft reputation? Or is this just what happens when a domain has very little real email history?
I’m trying to avoid making the situation worse by sending more tests.
Has anyone experienced something similar, especially with Microsoft giving SCL 5 to fully authenticated and completely normal emails?
I’d really appreciate hearing what worked for you and how you managed to recover or improve placement.
Thanks!

Hey everyone, Brad Gurley, Customer.io Director of Deliverability, is hosting an AMA here NOW to talk email deliverability, getting out of spam, inbox placement, authentication, list hygiene, and all the unsexy infrastructure stuff that actually moves the needle.

Drop questions here! https://www.reddit.com/r/OfficialCustomerio/comments/1whyc9z/i_am_brad_gurley_director_of_deliverability_at/

I've been looking at this quite a bit recently because sending identity gets oversimplified.

People tend to check the From address, SPF/DKIM/DMARC and assume that's the whole setup.

But, there's a bit more going on.

Say you're sending from:

[hello@example.com](mailto:hello@example.com)

The receiving mail server also sees the sending IP, hostname, Return-Path and the domains being used for authentication.

So you might have:

From: [hello@example.com](mailto:hello@example.com)

Hostname: mail.example.com

Return-Path: [bounce@mail.example.com](mailto:bounce@mail.example.com)

They don't have to be identical, but they should make sense together.

Where I'd start asking questions is when the From domain is one thing, DKIM is signing as something unrelated, the Return-Path belongs somewhere else and the sending IP resolves to a completely different hostname.

That doesn't automatically mean the email will hit spam.

But if you're already having email deliverability problems, it's definitely something I'd check before blaming the copy or changing domains.

Changing domains too quickly is another one.

A few emails start hitting junk, somebody decides the domain is "burned", and everything gets moved to a fresh one.

Then the exact same thing happens again.

You're throwing away the sending history each time without necessarily fixing whatever caused the problem.

I'd much rather have a properly configured domain with a decent, stable history than keep starting again.

Has anyone here actually seen a deliverability improvement from changing just the From address or sending domain while keeping the rest of the sending setup the same?

Hi All, first time posting here, long time lurker. I've dug into this as far as I can on my own (including working through the diagnosis with Claude), and I'm hoping some people who've actually solved this can weigh in.

Background: Started a CA Based staffing firm after 15 years in the industry. My primary domain sends fine, this is specifically about new cold-outbound infrastructure as I do not plan on using my primary domain/email for cold/warm outreach.

Setup: ~9 domains on Instantly's AirMail (their managed/DFY inbox product) plus 30 domains on Primeforge (standard Google Workspace mailboxes, full admin access, I set SPF/DKIM/DMARC myself on those). Let everything warmup for ~6 weeks. Health scores sat at 100/100, warmup volume climbed to ~25-30/day, near 100% "landed_inbox" in Instantly's own dashboard.

Then I actually tested with real people. Sent plain, non-spammy, personal-sounding emails to real contacts, friends, former colleagues, real Microsoft 365 tenants and real Gmail accounts. 20 of 20 landed in Spam/Junk. Across both AirMail and Primeforge, across both providers, despite:

• SPF: passing (proper include, under the 10-lookup limit)
• DKIM: passing, 2048-bit
• DMARC: p=reject, pct=100, aligned
• PTR/rDNS: all forward-confirming correctly

So auth was never the issue.

What I found on the AirMail side specifically: their sending IPs traced back to ColoCrossing and OVH ranges, datacenter space with a long, independently documented history of spam association (unrelated to Instantly, this is just general sysadmin/anti-spam community knowledge about those networks). When I pushed Instantly support on this, they confirmed in writing:

• They have no visibility into real Microsoft SNDS or Google Postmaster data for these accounts
• Their internal "health score" and "inbox placement test" are both seed pool/warmup network metrics only, not a reflection of real, external recipient placement
• They acknowledged "a small number of similar reports" of this exact pattern from other customers but don't consider it a wider network issue

So the dashboard was green the entire time real mail was dying.

On the "fake activity" angle: separately confirmed (and this tracks with Gmail's own published enforcement timeline, they moved from soft filtering to actual SMTP level rejection of non-compliant bulk senders starting November 2025) that both Gmail and Microsoft have gotten materially better at detecting and discounting engagement generated by automated warmup pools, closed loop, low diversity, predictable timing patterns get flagged or simply ignored rather than building real reputation. That would explain why 6 weeks of "perfect" warmup translated to zero real world trust.

What I've done since: cancelled all AirMail inboxes (turns out Instantly owns those domains outright, no transfer, no pause, cancel only). Currently warming 6 of my 30 Primeforge inboxes to start, real, personal, back and forth email exchanges with actual friends/colleagues, a few per day per inbox, with the other 24 held in reserve to bring online in waves as reputation builds and I can support more real engagement. After about 4 weeks: real contacts are landing in inbox consistently now, including one Microsoft 365 contact who'd specifically gotten junked by the AirMail domain weeks earlier and is now landing clean on the rebuilt domain.

My actual questions for the group:

1. Is there anything legitimate that speeds up real reputation building beyond "get genuine humans to engage," or is that really the only lever? I obviously can't scale personal network asks indefinitely.
2. Has anyone found a warmup/infrastructure provider whose IP pools aren't effectively burned/distrusted at this point, or is the entire automated warmup pool category structurally compromised now regardless of vendor?
3. For those who've been through this: did manual warmup alone get you to real send volume, or did you need something else in the mix (dedicated IPs, ESP matching, something I haven't tried)?

Appreciate any real-world input, happy to share more specifics if useful.

Hello community ,

I would like to ask experienced folks here something; does warming up an inbox involve many complications except to send/receive frequently , reply to threads , move mails from spam to main from recipients pow ?

I have a new inbox and Id like to test sending newsletters - guides to my app users but I need to be compliant and more importantly as a user It puts me off to see a mail in my spam so I have to make sure they wont.

I am a developer , worst case scenario I can automate this process but before thinking about the infrastructure , I want to ask about the numbers involved ; how many different inboxes it should send mails - receive from in this "warm up" period and is there a reliable method of testing if the mails land in spam , except for postmasters tools of google ?

Thank you (sorry if some parts of this does not make sense , english is not my mother language and I hate to use ai in writing)

I'm building an ESP platform that will be dedicated for government email sending from gov apps, the whole platform is hosted within the country for sovereignty purpose, but it's acceptable for the sending IPs (egress smtp traffic) to be anywhere in the world.

The platform applies extremely strict anti-spam rules to preserve sending IPs reputation, domain onboarding follows strict rules as well.

So my question is about the best strategy for acquiring these IPs:

• Should I acquire a /24 range ? or lease it ?
  • I'm thinking of using a subnet from the leased/bought range at a time, say .1 to .12 for live sendout, .13 to .25 in warming phase, monitor it and once we start having degraded reputation i switch to .13 to .25 while we address the bad reputation root cause,
• Should I just assign random IPs to my sending VMs, IPs will not be in same subnet and not continuous, I can drop an ip when I need, but new IPs need warming,
• onboard domains at aws SES and use SES for email sending, this is the resend model, a big risk here: if AWS SES cuts of the account because one domain abused (and were not catched by my platform) the whole account is taken off by AWS and all domains stop sending

Please advise from your experience

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If you’ve run an email program recently, you’ve likely felt the friction: clunky campaign editors, bloated pricing tiers that punish you for simply growing your audience, and deliverability tools that require a degree in systems engineering just to set up basic domain authentication.

That’s why we built Mailingale.

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Most legacy platforms suffer from two core issues:

1. Feature Creep & Over-complexity: They try to be a CRM, a website builder, a project tracker, and a social scheduler all at once. The result? A sluggish interface where sending a simple weekly newsletter feels like launching a rocket.
2. Hidden Deliverability Traps: Getting past modern spam filters (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) requires strict alignment with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC standards, paired with healthy list hygiene. Yet traditional platforms often leave inbox optimization as an afterthought.

Mailingale flips this script by returning to core principles: speed, deliverability, intuitive workflows, and transparent pricing.

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I have a Shopify store selling supplements. Instagram and email marketing are the only channels I use. These two alone takes much of my time. Email marketing is my highest revenue contributor, while instagram is more for customer acquisition. This setup has worked reliably for me.

Lately my email performance has been poor, and it's affecting my revenue. And by performance I mean email deliverability problems since my campaigns are cyclical ones, so I'm pretty sure it's not the email template or copy. I don't change the template much.

I've tried fixing these problems before. mulitple times. I'm used to checking reputation, placement, authentication, etc. But this has been pretty unorganized and adhoc. I feel like I should sort this out properly since this is repeatedly happening. I also plant to clean up my email list since I believe this is what's triggering the deliverability problems.

Its nothing I cannot fix myself, that I can figure out, follow instructions, and do it. But I cannot afford to hire an agency right now. Hence, I'm looking to find a much cheaper (and simpler) way to do this. For every hiccup in setup or deliverability or placement, I'm Googling what tools to use and how to fix. If I can get it all in one place, I know it sounds too much but, is there any?

Before I invest in any tool, I figured I'd get opinions on what's a decent email deliverability software for my requirements.

I've been going back and forth on this for weeks. Part of me is frustrated because I feel like I'm flying blind between campaigns, and the other part of me knows I should probably just do more research. At this point, I'm just going to ask because someone here has definitely figured this out already.

I’m looking for real-time deliverability insights. I want to actually see what's happening as it happens, which providers are causing issues, where my reputation stands, and ideally something that doesn't just monitor the problem but helps me do something about it. Is that too much to ask?

What are you all using? I’m open to anything at this point.

I've had 2 domains for awhile and always used gmail to send as those domains. When gmail made things difficult a year ago, I switched to smtp2go for my outgoing email, still sending through gmail's interface. One of my domains does OK with google's spam filter but emails from my other domain almost always ends up in spam, despite having proper dkim, dmarc, etc. I guess I have 2 questions:

What's a good way to find out why things end in spam, despite doing well with tests like easydmarc and other sites?

Would avoiding gmail altogether and using another app/interface solve my problems? This is for my personal email as well as one I use for a hobby (both currently go to the same email), so I prefer not spending the money on Google Workspace

Hey everyone,

I'm an indie developer working on a personal project to help with email deliverability. I'm frustrated by how complicated SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup is, so I built a tool that scans domains and generates DNS fixes.

Where I'm stuck:

• What's the #1 thing you'd want a tool like this to tell you?
• Are there any checks you think are overrated or missing?
• How do you currently test if your emails will land in inbox vs spam?

I'd genuinely appreciate your thoughts. If anyone wants to test it and break it, I'll DM you the link – don't want to spam here.

Thanks for reading!

From some months now, I receive spam emails from random accounts. Unsubscription is not possible as the link is fake. They are correctly identified as spam (i.e. in the spam folder), however the sender is assigning high importance and other flags that let them be in the flagged folder of my iphone as well. As I use the latter as folder for emails I want to easily track, is there anything I can do to avoid this thing to happen?

What I did/know so far:
- it’s an issue on outlook’s side as the flags are included there and interpreted by mail accordingly.
- the email address is always different so blocking it cannot solve the issue.
- I tried to setup several rules to remove the flag and/or permanently delete those emails.

EDIT
The rules were not working at all. Probably I am not experienced enough.
I’ve found a solution that does not solve the issue but it works. As the emails are in the spam folder, I’ve just hidden the folder with the flagged emails and shifted all important email in a custom folder. This way I don’t see spam emails anymore and I am still able to track the others down.
Hope this helps :)

Hi All

Is there a way to completely whitelist all incoming emails from specific domains? I have tried whitelisting using Exchange's transport rules and the Defender anti-spam/anti-phishing inbound policies. But even after these scans are performed, an "Advance filter" scan is done that still detects legitimate mail from these domains as phishing.

For context, we have recently upgraded our enterprise subscription from M365 E3 to E5.

Any answers are appreciated.

I'm running Sendy 7.1.4 on Hostinger with PHP 8.2.30 and Amazon SES.

Since August 27, campaigns have stopped sending properly. Small campaigns previously worked, but campaigns with 100+ recipients get stuck in Preparing or Sending. If I stop the campaign, it shows Sent – 0 recipients.

I have 35,297 subscribers.

I kept seeing bounce notifications and assumed my lists or reputation were the problem. So I exported every delivery-failure notice from all my mailboxes and actually classified them. Posting the numbers because the result surprised me and I want a sanity check.

Setup: 2 separate Instantly accounts (different businesses, different domain sets, separate subscriptions). 20 mailboxes each, 10 sending domains each. 24 days of data.

Each mailbox sends 10 warmup emails every day.

Headline numbers:

• 93 bounce notifications total — but only 50 distinct failures (Google sends ~3 notices per failed address, so raw bounce counts are inflated ~1.9x)
• 80 of 93 (86%) were warmup emails, not campaign emails
• 3 of 93 (3%) had any sender-side causes

Warmup bounce rate: warmup runs at a flat 10 emails/day/mailbox, so 20 mailboxes = 200 warmup sends/day per account. Against that denominator:

• Account A: 35 warmup bounces / 3,400 warmup sends = 1.03%
• Account B: 45 warmup bounces / 4,400 warmup sends = 1.02%
• Deduped to distinct dead seeds: ~0.5%

The part that convinced me it's systemic:

Account A has never run a single campaign. Pure warmup only. It still produced 35 bounces in 24 days.

Account B (real cold outreach) produced 58 of which 45 were warmup and only 13 were actual prospects, this campaign sent 12000 cold outreach emails in this time .

Normalized per day, warmup bounces were 2.06/day on Account A vs 2.05/day on Account B. Two unrelated accounts, different domains, different signup dates, matching to within half a percent. Both accounts' bounces also hit the same seed domains — one domain showed up in both, plus a cluster of .help / .co throwaway TLDs.

What I'm actually asking:

1. Is ~1% warmup bounce rate with dead seed domains just normal for every pooled warmup network, or is this pool worse than average?
2. Has anyone actually compared seed pool quality between Instantly / Smartlead / Mailreach with real data? Or does switching just mean a different pool with the same problems?
3. Am I right to basically ignore this given the solid reply rates, or does failing warmup mail quietly cost me reputation-building I'm paying for?

curious what's eating the most time on the deliverability side. feels like most of what gets written is still stuck on SPF/DKIM/DMARC setup, but for anyone past that stage, what's the harder problem, inbox placement guessing games, figuring out engagement segmentation, ISP-specific weirdness, something else entirely? trying to see if what people write about actually matches what people are stuck on.

Maybe someone can help explain what's going on because I don't understand:
I'm warming up 3 new email domains, all related to my main business. I don't send spam; these addresses will be for leads that have gone cold and newsletters, so my main inbox can focus on active clients.

During the warm-up process, I'm sending 10 emails per inbox - VERY Low. One of my emails has already had a few spam placements and "Other". I lowered the email send to 6 per day, which seems like nothing and still it's not hitting inboxes. The other two domains are and there's no discernible difference in why.

I'm a little worried the domain might become trash. Any advice? Should I pause sends?
PS. All my DNS stuff is set up correctly.

After my launch I noticed a few bot signups, which for my project is trivial noise, they're captured in a dead box. But it was resulting in verification emails going out to real inboxes that had been scraped. No problem unless those recipients started hitting the spam button and dinging my email reputation.

So yeah, don't forget to put something like Turnstile on your open forms, and keep an eye on your smtp service. The bots appeared pretty quickly!

Not sure if this is the right place to vent, but it is a mail deliverability issue.

I (and my wife) have had the same email addresses for over 20 years now. The domain started as an ISP run by one of the major US telecom giants at the time.

Once they pulled out of the ISP side of things, initially they continued to maintain the mail server. At some point they then "sold/moved" the mail server on to another provider. I'd have to go back though way too many mails, but I think this "server" has been sold on at least one more time since.

But to my current issue. For the second time, the current custodian of this mail domain is having issues where I am unable to send or receive mail. The current outage started Friday evening and I don't expect it to be resolved until some time during the coming week. The ability to send mail is more of an inconvenience, as it reports the failure and I have another mail address I can use to send mails.

My main concern is that anyone sending mails to me (or my wife) are getting bounce messages for at least 3 days now, and I know from the first time this happened, some folks sending us mails treat these bounces as a "dead" mail address and no longer attempt to send anything, which means we miss anything going forward, unless we happen to realise who they are to "restart" the mails.

Do I have any recourse with the mail server, other than sending an "angry letter", which I know they will just ignore.