Deliverability & staying out of spam
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
- Don’t touch the DNS records Faivelo set up — they’re your authentication.
- Warm up a new domain — start with small sends and ramp up over weeks.
- Only email people who asked — never purchased or scraped lists.
- Watch your bounce and complaint rates — under 2% bounces, well under 0.1% complaints.
- Write like a human — real content, a plain-text version, a working unsubscribe.
- 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 bounce and complaint rates. Amazon SES — the infrastructure your campaign mail rides on — treats a 2% bounce rate as the danger line, so Faivelo enforces thresholds before you get there:
| Signal | Warning | Sending paused | Suspended |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bounce rate | 1.5% | 2% | 5% |
| Complaint rate | 0.05% | 0.1% | 0.3% |
- Warning: you get an email alert and campaign sending is throttled while you clean your lists.
- Paused: campaigns stop automatically until the problem is fixed.
- Suspended: reserved for severe abuse; contact support to appeal.
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.
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.