Loading…
Email is the only channel with a spam folder. No platform approves your message, and nobody tells you it was filtered — so the rules that replace approval are technical, public, and enforced by the mailbox providers themselves.
Three records prove a message really came from your domain. SPF lists who may send for it, DKIM signs each message so it cannot be altered in transit, and DMARC tells a receiving server what to do when one of those fails. Gmail requires SPF or DKIM from every sender, and both plus DMARC from anyone sending five thousand or more messages a day to Gmail addresses. Outlook's consumer mailboxes went the same way in 2025: high-volume mail without all three is rejected outright with a 550 5.7.15 error.
The count that decides whether you are a "bulk sender" is per domain, not per address, and Google's own FAQ says the status is permanent once reached. Set the records up when you connect a domain, not when a campaign is waiting.
In Zynqly the records are shown on the address's Sending domain tab with a status against each one, and the check re-runs on its own every hour. Until they verify, replies still go out — from your Zynqly address rather than your own domain — so support never waits on DNS.
The first is bounces: addresses that do not exist. A handful is normal. A list where many bounce tells the receiving server that you are mailing addresses you never confirmed, which is what a bought list looks like from the outside.
The second matters more. Spam complaints are people pressing "report spam", and Google publishes the line: keep them under 0.10%, and never let them reach 0.30%. That is three complaints in a thousand messages. Cross it and filtering does not stop at the campaign that caused it — ordinary replies from the same domain start landing in spam too.
Zynqly's Deliverability page shows both rates per address over the last thirty days, against those limits, with a sentence on what to do rather than a number on its own.
Marketing mail to Gmail and Yahoo must carry a List-Unsubscribe header and support one-click unsubscribing (RFC 8058), alongside a visible link in the message. The mailbox shows that link at the top of the message, and a person who uses it never has to press "report spam" — which is precisely the point: the easy exit protects the number above.
Requests have to be honoured within two days. Transactional mail — an order confirmation, a password reset, a reply to something the customer asked — is exempt, and adding an unsubscribe link to it only confuses people.
Zynqly adds both the header and the footer link to marketing sends, and an unsubscribe writes to one do-not-email list that every reply, automation, sequence and broadcast checks before sending.
Reputation follows the sending domain. If your newsletter and your support replies leave from the same one, a bad campaign takes the replies down with it. The standard answer is a subdomain for marketing — news.yourcompany.com — separate from the address customers write to.
A brand-new sending domain has no reputation at all, good or bad. Start with the people who wrote to you most recently and build up over about a month rather than sending to everyone on day one.
The other half of the rule is consent, and it is per channel: someone who agreed to WhatsApp updates has not agreed to email. Under India's DPDP Act consent must be specific, informed and recorded with what the person was shown, and withdrawing it has to be as easy as giving it.
Apple Mail's privacy protection loads the tracking image for every message whether or not anyone read it, so open rates from Apple addresses are inflated and no longer comparable over time. Clicks and replies are what remain honest, and complaints and unsubscribes are the only numbers that tell you a list is unhappy.
It is a better way to work anyway: a campaign judged on replies is a campaign written to be answered.
Check authentication first — SPF, DKIM and DMARC on the domain you send from. Then the complaint rate on the Deliverability page. Most spam problems are one of those two, and both are visible before you guess at subject lines.
No. Transactional mail about something the customer bought or asked for is exempt, and mailbox providers treat it differently from marketing. Zynqly keeps the two on separate streams so an unsubscribe from offers never stops an order update.
Only permanent bounces block — an address that does not exist. A full mailbox or a server having a bad day is a soft bounce and changes nothing. A blocked address can be let through again from the Deliverability page when you know the problem is fixed.
Five thousand or more to Gmail addresses in a day, counted per domain. Small businesses rarely reach it, but the authentication requirements below that line are nearly the same, so set the records up once and stop thinking about it.