# Deliverability & staying out of spam > Keep your domain's reputation clean and your mail in the inbox. Deliverability isn't magic — it's a reputation. Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo score every sending domain on its history: authentication, bounce rates, complaints, and whether people actually read the mail. Faivelo handles the technical half automatically; the other half is how you send. This page covers both. ## The quick checklist 1. **Don't touch the DNS records Faivelo set up** — they're your authentication. 2. **Warm up a new domain** — start with small sends and ramp up over weeks. 3. **Only email people who asked** — never purchased or scraped lists. 4. **Watch your bounce and complaint rates** — under 2% bounces, well under 0.1% complaints. 5. **Write like a human** — real content, a plain-text version, a working unsubscribe. 6. **Earn engagement** — send things people open and reply to. Each point, in detail: ## 1. Authentication is the foundation When you added your domain, Faivelo created DNS records for **SPF**, **DKIM**, and **DMARC**. Together they prove to receiving servers that mail claiming to be from your domain really is — and mail that fails these checks is increasingly rejected outright, not just filtered. You don't need to understand the acronyms. You need to know one thing: **don't delete or edit those records.** If you (or your web developer, or a site migration) change DNS at your registrar, keep Faivelo's records intact. The domain page in your dashboard shows whether every record is still verified — if one goes red, fix it before sending anything. ## 2. Warm up a new domain A domain with no sending history is a stranger. If a stranger suddenly sends 10,000 emails, mailbox providers assume spam. Ramp up gradually instead: - **Week 1:** a few dozen emails a day, ideally to people likely to open and reply. - **Weeks 2–3:** a few hundred per day if bounces stay near zero. - **Week 4 onward:** scale toward your real volume, roughly doubling week over week. There's no exact formula — the principle is *consistent, gradually increasing volume with good engagement*. A month of patience buys you years of inbox placement. ## 3. List hygiene: only mail people who opted in This is the single biggest factor you control. - **Never buy, rent, or scrape lists.** They're full of dead addresses and spam traps, and the recipients didn't ask to hear from you — they will bounce and complain, and your domain pays the price. - **Use opt-in signups**, ideally confirmed (double opt-in), so every address is real and willing. - **Remove people who never engage.** An address that hasn't opened anything in six months is a liability, not an asset. - **Let bounces go.** Faivelo removes hard-bounced addresses for you (see below) — don't re-import them from an old spreadsheet. ## 4. Bounce and complaint rates Faivelo continuously monitors every sending domain and recalculates its 30-day campaign bounce and complaint rates: hard bounces and spam reports on campaign mail, over campaign mail. Soft bounces (a full mailbox, a greylisting retry) never count. Mailbox providers start to care around a **2% bounce rate**, so the first line is a heads-up there, and campaigns pause at the same 4% line the account is judged on:
Signal Warning Sending paused Review
Bounce rate 2% 4% 8%
Complaint rate 0.05% 0.1% 0.3%
- **Warning:** a heads-up email with your numbers; nothing changes yet. - **Paused:** campaigns from the domain stop automatically. Mailboxes, everyday mail and the API are not affected. The pause lifts itself after a week once the rates are back under the line, or sooner after a word with support. - **Review:** the same pause, plus someone on our team looks at the domain with you. Your account is never suspended automatically over a bad list. The table above is per sending domain and applies to campaigns. Account-wide, across every lane including the API, the hard-bounce line is **4% of what the account sent over the last two days** (Resend's published limit). A paid account is judged on that two-day rate, never on a single hour. Two things sit under that number and never move: one account can never produce more than a small share of the platform's daily bounces before it is slowed, and if the platform's own bounce metric climbs, every account is judged on a stricter 1.5% line for 24 hours. Only the signature of a spam script or a stolen password (a burst of bounces that is most of what a mailbox sent) pauses sending immediately regardless of rate. If your rates improve, the warning clears automatically. And note how low the complaint bar is: just **1 spam report per 1,000 emails** is a warning. That's why consent matters so much. Faivelo also handles the cleanup for you: **hard-bounced addresses and anyone who reports your mail as spam are added to your suppression list automatically** and never emailed again. Mid-campaign, if a particular recipient domain starts bouncing, Faivelo stops mailing that domain immediately rather than burning your reputation on it. ### Verify a list before sending For a list you did not collect yourself, or one that has sat for a while, verify it first. Faivelo checks every address against its live mail server and sorts the list into three buckets:
Bucket Meaning What happens at send time
Deliverable The mailbox exists Sends
Accept-all The server accepts any address, so nobody can tell Held back unless you include them
Undeliverable The mailbox does not exist Removed from every send
Verification costs **1 cent per address with a $5 minimum**, charged only when you choose it, from **Campaigns → Verify** or from any recipient list. A campaign that the 200-send check paused offers the same button; after verifying, resuming runs the check again on the cleaned list. Verification never lifts an account pause: it stops the next one. ## 5. Content that doesn't look like spam Filters read your email before humans do: - **Avoid classic spam patterns** — ALL-CAPS subjects, walls of exclamation marks, "FREE!!!", deceptive subject lines, link shorteners, or an email that's one giant image with no text. - **Include a plain-text version.** Faivelo campaigns send both HTML and plain text when you provide it — fill in the text version; HTML-only mail scores worse. - **Keep a working unsubscribe.** Every Faivelo campaign automatically includes one-click unsubscribe headers that Gmail and Outlook surface as a native button. Don't try to work around it — an easy unsubscribe is what *prevents* spam complaints. - **Send from a real mailbox and welcome replies.** A no-reply address that bounces responses is a negative signal. ## 6. Engagement matters Mailbox providers watch what recipients *do*: opens, clicks, replies, moves to the spam folder, moves *out* of the spam folder. High engagement is the strongest positive signal there is. - Send only when you have something worth reading. - A smaller, engaged list beats a huge, cold one — every time. - Ask new subscribers to reply to your first email; replies are gold for reputation. ## What Faivelo does for you So you know where the line is — these parts are handled automatically: - **SPF, DKIM, and DMARC** records generated for every domain, with verification status on your dashboard. - **A custom MAIL FROM domain**, so bounce-handling happens under your own domain instead of a shared one — providers see a consistent, aligned sender. - **Automatic suppression** of hard bounces and complaints, applied to all future campaigns. - **Reputation monitoring** that recalculates your bounce and complaint rates continuously, emails you at the first warning sign, and pauses sending before real damage is done. - **Paced sending and mid-campaign protection**, including skipping recipient domains that start bouncing. ## Next steps - [Send your first campaign](/sending/campaigns) - [Check your sending limits](/sending/limits) - [See your metrics](https://faivelo.com/metrics)