An online retailer discovers its DMARC record was missing and fixes it in October. Good. Then, for its biggest sale of the year, it sends to the full list, including tens of thousands of contacts who haven’t opened anything in two years. Complaints jump, Gmail starts filtering, and the team concludes that “the DMARC fix didn’t work.”
The fix worked fine. It just wasn’t the only thing wrong. Inbox problems rarely have a single cause: a setup gap usually sits alongside a tired list or a sending habit that providers have learned to distrust, and repairing one while the others carry on gets you very little. This service is the hands-on work of fixing them together, in the right order.
Is this the right starting point?
If you already know roughly what’s wrong, or a review has identified the causes, this is the service for you. If you’re not sure yet why mail is going to spam, start with our email deliverability review. It’s the diagnosis. This page is the treatment.
Many engagements do both: a short review to establish the evidence, then a remediation plan built from the findings.
The recovery plan
Every plan is different in detail, but the order matters, and it rarely changes much.
Stop the damage
Before fixing anything, we reduce what’s making it worse. That can mean pausing sends to unengaged segments, suppressing addresses that have hard bounced, or holding a large campaign back for a few weeks. It’s usually the least popular step and the most important one.
Repair authentication and sender identity
SPF, DKIM and DMARC set up correctly for every platform that sends as your domain, with the From domain aligned. A consistent sender name and address, and a reply-to address someone actually reads.
Clean and segment the list
Remove or suppress addresses that bounce, define what “inactive” means for your business, and split the list by engagement so the most interested recipients are mailed first.
Rebuild sending volume gradually
Start with the most engaged segment, then widen the audience in steps. Each increase depends on how the previous one performed at each mailbox provider.
Monitor and adjust
Watch complaint rates, bounces, provider dashboards and DMARC reports through the recovery, and adjust the pace when something moves the wrong way.
Hand over the guardrails
Document the suppression rules, sunset policy and volume limits so the problem doesn’t quietly return six months later.
The technical fixes
SPF, DKIM and DMARC
We fix what’s broken and finish what’s partial. In practice that’s often a second SPF record that invalidates the first, an SPF record that exceeds the ten-lookup limit after a new tool was added, a platform still signing DKIM with its own domain instead of yours, or a CRM sending sales email that DMARC reports show failing every day. Where it makes sense, we move DMARC from monitoring toward an enforcement policy, but only after the reports show every legitimate source is aligned.
Sending domains and mailbox architecture
Most businesses send several kinds of email from one domain without thinking about it: newsletters, receipts, password resets, sales emails, support replies. When one stream damages the domain’s reputation, all of them suffer. We often separate streams onto subdomains, for example marketing on one and transactional on another. This helps, but it isn’t a firewall. Mailbox providers still take the parent domain into account, so a subdomain won’t hide sustained bad practice.
Sender identity
Recipients complain about mail they don’t recognize. A From name that changes between campaigns, a no-reply address, or a sending domain that doesn’t match your website all make people more likely to hit the spam button. These are small changes with a real effect on complaints.
The list and behavior fixes
Bounce reduction and suppression
Hard bounces should be suppressed automatically, and most platforms do that. The problems we find are elsewhere: contacts re-imported from a CRM or spreadsheet after being suppressed, signup forms with no validation, or old lists being restored “just for one campaign.” We trace where the bad addresses come from and close that door, so the cleanup doesn’t have to be repeated.
Inactive contacts and engagement segmentation
Contacts who haven’t engaged in a long time drag reputation down, and sending to them anyway is one of the most common reasons recovery stalls. “Inactive” depends on your business: a monthly-subscription brand and a once-a-year B2B buyer should not use the same window. We define it with you, set up engagement-based segments in your platform, run a reactivation attempt where it’s worthwhile, and then suppress those who still don’t respond.
Sending-volume changes and domain warm-up
Mailbox providers are suspicious of sudden changes. A new domain or IP with no history, or a damaged domain that suddenly sends at full volume again, looks exactly like a spammer. Warm-up means building volume gradually, starting with recipients most likely to open and click, so providers see positive engagement before they see scale. We don’t use a fixed table. The pace depends on your normal volume and on how each provider responds as we go.
Reputation recovery
There’s no switch for this. Reputation recovers when providers see a sustained period of authenticated mail that recipients want: low complaints, few bounces, healthy engagement. Depending on how bad the starting point is, that can take weeks or longer, and part of our job is keeping the team from undoing the progress with one large send.
Ready to fix it properly?
We'll scope a recovery plan around your domains, platforms and list, and do the hands-on work with your team.
Cold-email infrastructure
Outbound sales email carries more risk than marketing email, because the recipients didn’t ask to hear from you. The most important rule is simple: don’t send cold email from the domain your business depends on.
For outbound teams we set up separate sending domains, each with its own SPF, DKIM and DMARC, a modest number of mailboxes per domain, and conservative daily limits per mailbox. New mailboxes go through a warm-up period before carrying real campaigns. Lists are verified before sending, tracking is configured on a custom domain or switched off, and replies are routed back into the CRM so sales can see them.
Automated warm-up tools have a place, but we treat them as support, not as the plan. Real deliverability for outbound comes from accurate targeting, relevant messages and volume that stays within what each mailbox can sustain. Cold outreach also has to meet the opt-out and consent rules in the countries you’re sending to.
We do this work in tools such as Smartlead and Apollo, connected to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365 mailboxes.
Monitoring
You can’t manage recovery without data. Depending on your volume and setup, we set up and read:
- Google Postmaster Tools, whose current version focuses on a compliance status view and the spam rate reported by Gmail users.
- Yahoo Sender Hub, including its complaint feedback loop.
- Microsoft SNDS, mainly useful when you send from dedicated IP addresses.
- DMARC aggregate reports, through a reporting tool, to see every source sending as your domain.
- Your email platform’s own data, broken down by mailbox provider, because a problem at Gmail can be hidden by healthy numbers everywhere else.
- Blocklist checks for your domains and sending IPs.
During the engagement you’ll get a regular update on what changed, what we saw and what’s next.
What we can promise, and what we can’t
We can’t promise inbox placement, and nobody honestly can. Mailbox providers make that decision with their own systems, and they change those systems without notice.
What we can promise is a plan built on evidence, every change documented, and an honest read of the data as it comes in. If the numbers aren’t improving, we’ll tell you, along with what we think is causing it.
Pricing
Deliverability improvement is scoped individually, because severity varies so much. A single domain with an authentication gap is a different job from three damaged domains, two platforms and an outbound team sending from the main domain. The things that drive scope are the number of domains and sending platforms, the size and condition of the list, whether cold email is involved and how long monitoring needs to continue. See the pricing page for how we price other services.
How long does deliverability recovery take?
It depends on how damaged the reputation is and how consistently the new practices are followed. Authentication fixes take effect quickly. Reputation recovery usually takes several weeks of steady, clean sending, sometimes longer. We’ll give you an estimate once we’ve seen the data.
Can you guarantee our emails will reach the inbox?
No. Anyone who guarantees inbox placement is promising something they don’t control. We fix the causes we can find and measure the results honestly.
Do we have to stop sending during recovery?
Usually not entirely. Most recoveries keep mail going to engaged recipients while risky segments are paused. Stopping everything can slow recovery, since providers need to see good behavior to update their view.
Should we get a dedicated IP or switch email platforms?
Not by default. A dedicated IP only helps if you send enough volume to keep it warm and consistent. Switching platforms doesn’t reset your domain’s reputation. Sometimes either move is right, but we’d recommend it only with evidence.
Do we have to delete our inactive contacts?
You don’t have to delete them, but you should stop mailing them routinely. Suppressed contacts can stay in your CRM for sales history or reporting. They just shouldn’t be in your regular campaign audience.
Can you help with cold-email domains that are already burned?
Often the practical answer is to retire them and build new infrastructure with better limits and targeting. We’ll look at what caused the damage first, otherwise the new domains go the same way.