Cold email deliverability guide

What actually moves placement

Inbox providers do not owe you the primary tab. They score the domain, the IP, the mailbox, the list, and the copy together. EmailPal runs the infrastructure half of that — DNS, hosted mail, warming, isolated IPs, verification. You still own the list and the copy.

This page is the checklist. If you only remember one line: unknown or dirty senders get filtered, and no sequencer setting overrides that.

The checklist

1. Authenticate. MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC green on public DNS. EmailPal writes them on domains we host and re-verifies them. How to set up DNS records (MX, SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
2. Warm, or skip the wait with inventory. A new mailbox has no placement history because you provisioned it. Sending is never blocked, but cold volume is safest once the mailbox is flagged campaign-ready and its inbox rate looks healthy, or lease pre-warmed mailboxes. When is a mailbox ready to send?.
3. Stay inside the cap. 15/day per inbox is the recommended default (pre-warmed inboxes start there from day one), and never more than 100 on any inbox. More volume means more inboxes, not a higher cap. Sending limits per mailbox.
4. Verify before you send. Catch-alls, disabled mailboxes and role addresses are bounce factories. A 4% bounce rate will undo warmup. How to verify an email list before sending.
5. Separate the sending domain from the company site. Do not blast from acme.com. Use a secondary sending domain.
6. Watch reputation, not vanity opens. Open pixels inflate bot opens and can hurt new domains. How to check and improve your domain reputation.
7. Know the 2024 Gmail/Yahoo rules. Authenticated mail, low complaint rate, a working unsubscribe in the tool you send from. Google and Yahoo sender requirements.
8. Plain first mail. No attachments, no three tracking links, no "limited time" spam lexicon on a domain that inboxed yesterday only because of warming.

If mail is already in spam: Why emails go to spam.

What EmailPal does on its side

• Isolated IP pools so one customer's list does not define another customer's reputation. Isolated IP pools. Dedicated IPs are $20/mo on Growth and Scale if you need one.
• Warming against real Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, with spam rescue and weekend throttling. $0.60/mo, or included on pre-warmed leases.
• Measured inbox rate on pre-warmed listings — the listing *is* the placement test. We do not sell a separate SmartDelivery-style seed-test SKU.
• Verification that probes catch-alls (impossible mailbox first) instead of calling every SMTP "yes" valid.

What we will not pretend

EmailPal's own sequencer adds guardrails: launch checks and an automatic pause when a campaign's bounce rate passes your limit. Copy, personalization, unsubscribe handling and targeting are still on you, and on whatever you connect SMTP to (Instantly, Smartlead, Plusvibe). Infrastructure and guardrails cannot rescue a scraped list and a three-link HTML pitch. Auto-pause on bounces.

We also will not tell you to send 50 emails on day one from a pre-warmed inbox. The recommended volume is 15. That is how the measurement survives contact with a campaign.

Copy and sequencer settings that still matter

• Turn open tracking off on the first mail in a sequence. EmailPal does not require it, and its own sequencer does not offer it.
• Include an unsubscribe path the sequencer actually honors. EmailPal's own sequencer warns when the first email has no unsubscribe link (you place it yourself) and adds the one-click header by default. Any other tool has to do the same.
• Match volume to mailbox count. Fifty mailboxes at 15/day is 750 sends, not one mailbox at 750.
• Do not send the same body from every mailbox on a domain on the same hour.

FAQs

Is there a deliverability test like SmartDelivery?

Placement during warming *is* the test: the real inboxes in the warming network report inbox vs spam. Pre-warmed listings show that rate before you pay.

Should I turn on open tracking?

Not on a new or newly claimed mailbox's first mail. Bot opens are not engagement.

Outlook inboxes but Gmail does not, or the reverse

Microsoft is often harsher on new domains. Slow down. Do not chase the worse provider with more volume. Keep warming on.

Will a new IP fix a burned domain?

Usually no. IP and domain blacklists. Retire the name.

Does SPF -all or DMARC p=reject cause spam?

No. They stop spoofing. Spam is a reputation and content decision.

Need more help?

Open a support ticket with the domain, the mailbox, and whether you are on a plan mailbox or a pre-warmed lease.