deliverability · mechanism, not marketing

Inbox placement is engineering. Not marketing.

Most cold email tools market "deliverability" without showing a single number. Here's what imail actually does to keep your emails out of spam — and what we won't claim we can do.

the honest baseline

Nobody has 100% inbox placement.

Anyone claiming "99% inbox rate" is selling you something. What you can have is a sending stack that monitors itself, slows down when reputation dips, and tells you the moment something's wrong.

That's what imail ships. Here's how.

the deliverability stack · 6 mechanisms

Six things, each measurable.

01

Domain reputation, monitored continuously.

We check your sending domains against 15+ DNS blocklists every hour (Spamhaus, Barracuda, SORBS, Spamcop, and 11 others). The moment you appear on one, you get a notification with the specific list and the typical de-listing path.

spamhaus zen
spamhaus dbl
barracuda brbl
spamcop scbl
sorbs dnsbl
uribl multi
surbl multi
psbl
invaluement
+ 6 more
02

DMARC alignment monitoring.

DMARC reports come back from major ISPs telling you who's failing SPF/DKIM alignment. imail parses the reports and shows you a weekly dashboard: forwarders failing alignment, IPs outside your authorized range, percentages over time.

// /dmarc/aggregate · last 7d { domain: "sales.imail.now", alignment: { spf: 98.4%, dkim: 99.1%, dmarc: 97.8% }, failing_sources: [ { ip: "209.51.188.x", count: 14, reason: "mailman fwd" } ], policy: "quarantine", pct: 100 }
03

Bounce handling with auto-suppression.

Hard bounce? Added to your global suppression list within 60 seconds. Soft bounce more than 3 times? Same. The bounce category is parsed from the SMTP response and shown in your dashboard.

// SMTP response → category 550 5.1.1 mailbox does not exist → hard · no-mailbox 552 5.2.2 over quota → soft · over-quota 550 5.7.1 spam rejected → hard · content-blocked 421 4.7.0 try again later → soft · throttled
04

SPF / DKIM / DMARC wizard.

Tell us your domain registrar. We generate the exact DNS records — including quirks like Cloudflare's split-zone delegation or Dynadot's MX-on-subdomain limit. You paste, we verify, done.

// Cloudflare · sales.imail.now TXT @ "v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all" TXT google._domainkey "v=DKIM1; k=rsa; p=MIGfM..." TXT _dmarc "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:dmarc@..."
05

Per-inbox throttling and warmup.

Brand-new inbox? Starts at 5 sends/day for three days, ramps to 50, then 200 over 21 days. If reply rate dips below threshold during warmup, the schedule pauses automatically. You don't have to babysit a spreadsheet.

warmup curve · day 1 → day 21 5/day 50/day 200/day
06

Placement testing across 12+ ESPs.

Before launching a campaign, send to 12 test seed inboxes (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Zoho, FastMail, custom servers) and see where it landed: Primary / Promotions / Spam / Updates. Find out if your subject line is killing you before 10,000 leads do.

primary
9
promotions
2
spam
1
updates
0
what we don't do

What we don't do.
And don't claim to.

we don't claim

"99% inbox placement."

Anyone who does is either lying or measuring a non-representative sample. Real-world placement varies wildly by recipient ESP, time of day, content, list source, sender domain age, and a dozen other factors. We won't put a number on the page that doesn't survive contact with reality.

we don't oversell

"Private warmup network = guaranteed inbox."

The technical mechanism is fine. The marketing claim is misleading. Inbox placement is a function of dozens of signals — content, list quality, send volume curve, reply rate, DMARC alignment, IP reputation. A warmup network is one input. We use one. We don't oversell it.

the dashboard you actually use

A single deliverability view.
At a glance, in mono.

app.imail.now / deliverability last 7 days ▾
99.94%
delivered
↑ 0.2pp wow
0.18%
bounced
↓ 0.04pp wow
0.01%
complained
flat
97.8%
dmarc aligned
↑ 1.1pp wow
per domain status
sales.imail.now● clean · score 92
hello.imail.now● clean · score 89
team.imail.now● listed on 1 · score 71
outbound.imail.now● clean · score 95

Stop guessing about deliverability.

Get the dashboard. Get the data. Stop optimizing on vibes.