Deliverability is the work of reaching the inbox instead of the spam folder. It rests on your sending domain's reputation with each mailbox provider, on the quality of your list, and on your content. Sendara authenticates your domain and suppresses bad addresses for you. The rest is in your hands. This page collects the practices that matter most, in rough order of impact.
1. Authenticate every sending domain
Publish the 6 DNS records that Sendara returns when you add a domain, so DKIM, SPF, and DMARC all verify. Google and Yahoo now refuse or spam-folder bulk mail that is not authenticated. Sendara generates the records, including a starter DMARC record at p=none, and checks them after you publish them. See Domains and deliverability.
2. Raise your volume in stages
A new domain has no sending history, so a mailbox provider has no reason to trust it yet. If you send a large volume from a cold domain on the first day, Google and other providers throttle the mail or route it to spam, and that early reputation is hard to undo.
Sendara sends through shared Amazon SES infrastructure and does not raise your volume for you. Build the history yourself:
- Start small. Send a few hundred messages a day to your most engaged recipients first, meaning people who opened or replied recently.
- Raise the volume in stages over two to four weeks rather than all at once. Roughly doubling every few days is a common pace.
- Watch your bounce rate and complaint rate at each step. If a rate climbs, hold the volume until it settles.
- Keep a steady daily pattern. A large spike after a long gap reads as suspicious to a mailbox provider.
3. Keep complaints and bounces low
Complaints and bounces are the fastest way to lose a domain's reputation.
- Send only to people who asked for your mail. Purchased and scraped lists are the single most common cause of a ruined domain.
- Sendara suppresses an address after a hard bounce or a complaint, and it refuses later sends to that address, so you never mail a known-bad recipient twice.
- Sendara marks your account health from these rates. A complaint rate above 0.1% sets the health to
critical. A bounce rate above 5%, or above 2%, sets it towarning. Read both in your message events, and stop to verify your recipient data when a rate crosses a threshold.
4. Watch how Gmail rates your domain
Register your domain with Google at postmaster.google.comto see your domain's reputation, your spam complaint rate, and your authentication results as Gmail measures them. Read your DMARC aggregate reports for the same view across providers. Sendara reports the delivery, bounce, and complaint events that Amazon SES returns, and it does not measure which folder holds a message.
Common questions
- How many emails can I send on my first day?
- There is no fixed number, but start small. A new domain has no sending history, so a mailbox provider has no reason to trust it yet. Send a few hundred messages a day to your most engaged recipients, then raise the volume in stages over two to four weeks. A large first-day send from a cold domain often lands in spam, and that early reputation is hard to undo.
- Does Sendara raise my sending volume for me?
- No. Sendara sends through shared Amazon SES infrastructure and does not stage your volume. You raise it yourself, gradually, while you watch your bounce rate and complaint rate. If a rate climbs, hold the volume until it settles.
- What spam complaint rate does Gmail allow?
- Google states 0.3% as the maximum for bulk senders and recommends that you stay under 0.1%. Sendara marks your account health as critical at 0.1%, which is stricter, so you get a warning early. Read the rate on the analytics endpoints.
- My message delivered, so why did it land in spam?
- A delivered event from Amazon SES means the receiving server accepted the message. It does not say which folder holds it. Placement depends on your domain reputation, your list quality, and your content. Sendara reports the events that SES returns, and it does not measure the folder.