Deliverability
Bounce, complaint, and spam-placement health, with the thresholds Warmbly acts on.
Deliverability is whether your mail reaches the inbox instead of bouncing, getting marked as spam, or landing in junk. Warmbly tracks it per mailbox and per campaign, and acts automatically when a mailbox looks risky.
These defaults are deliberately stricter than the point where Google or Microsoft start penalizing senders, so action happens before provider enforcement hits your reputation.
The dashboard
Scope everything to 7d, 30d, or 90d with the range tabs. It updates live, so no refreshing.
| Section | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Headline rates | Deliverability score, bounce rate, complaint rate, spam placement, suppressed count |
| Over time | One metric per day: bounces, complaints, opens, replies, or sent. Use it to find the day something spiked |
| Window totals | Raw counts behind the rates |
| Seed inbox placement | Inbox vs spam share from test deliveries, with the sample count |
| Placement by provider | The same split per Gmail, Outlook, and IMAP/SMTP |
| Warmup placement by domain | Continuous placement per recipient domain, amber at 10% spam, red at 20% |
| At risk | Mailboxes and campaigns with bounce or complaint activity, worst first |
The score is a 0-100 composite starting at 100: bounce rate subtracts up to 40 points (maxed at 10%), complaint rate up to 30 (maxed at 0.30%), spam placement up to 40 (maxed at 40%). Bounce rate is highlighted at 5%, complaint rate at 0.1%.
Use Customize to pick which sections show. Your choices and time window persist per browser.
Placement needs a sample
Placement figures only appear once seed data exists, and a small sample is a hint rather than a verdict. Warmbly waits for a meaningful sample before acting.
Placement by provider is the check before scaling a campaign. An aggregate rate can look fine while one provider quietly junks everything: Gmail at 95% inbox with Outlook at 40% is a provider-specific problem, usually authentication or content, not volume.
Warmup placement is your continuous signal. Seed tests are point-in-time probes, but every verified warmup delivery reports inbox or spam, so drift appears here before it becomes complaints on a campaign.
Health bands
Each mailbox sits in a band, shown as a colored chip. The band controls how Warmbly treats it.
| Band | Spam placement | Complaint rate | Bounce rate | Other triggers |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Watch | >= 10% | >= 0.03% | n/a | n/a |
| Quarantine | >= 20% | >= 0.10% | >= 5% | Repeated suspicious warmup-token failures |
| Blocked | >= 40% | >= 0.30% | >= 10% | Clear abuse signals (token forgery, repeated spam flags) |
| Catastrophic | >= 80% | n/a | n/a | n/a |
A mailbox enters a band by crossing any single threshold. What each band does:
- Healthy: sending normally, nothing to do.
- Watch: warmup volume lowered and spacing increased. Cold volume is dampened by the same factor, so it slows across both before reaching quarantine.
- Quarantine: out of the shared paid warmup pool for
7 days, as neither sender nor recipient. Cold sending is throttled or paused. - Blocked: out of the shared pool for
30 days, review required before re-entry. - Catastrophic: immediate long block and a full reputation reset. No automatic return.
Sample floors stop one bad event flipping a new mailbox: spam placement needs 20+ warmup deliveries in 7 days, complaints need 100+ delivered emails in 30 days.
Different metrics, different failure modes
Warmbly never acts on the composite score alone. Complaint rate, spam placement, and bounce rate are tracked separately because they fail for different reasons, so any one can move a mailbox even while the score still looks fine.
Re-entry after a block
Time elapsing is not enough. A blocked mailbox must requalify: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC still healthy; no recent complaints or hard-bounce spikes; no recent invalid warmup-token attempts; spam placement back under 10% on a fresh probation sample. Re-entry then starts low, around 5-10/day of warmup.
Domain authentication
Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook all require SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, and failed alignment is the most common silent reason mail lands in spam. Warmbly checks each sending domain in the background about once a day, and on demand from the mailbox.
- Passing: SPF and DMARC both present, the two records readable authoritatively from DNS.
- Failing: SPF or DMARC missing.
- Unknown: not checked yet, or the lookup could not complete. A DNS hiccup never looks like a misconfiguration.
DKIM is advisory: selectors are not discoverable from DNS, so "not found" means unconfirmed, not absent. A domain can pass on SPF and DMARC with DKIM unconfirmed.
Informational today
Authentication state warns you; it does not block sending or warmup yet. Fixing a Failing domain is still the highest-impact deliverability change available to you.
Built-in protections
One-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058) puts a native Unsubscribe control in the recipient's mail client. It drives complaint rate down, because someone who can opt out cleanly rarely hits "mark as spam" instead, and Google's bulk-sender guidance effectively requires it at volume. Unsubscribes are suppressed automatically.
Pre-send verification checks an address before sending and skips undeliverable ones, keeping bad addresses from becoming the hard bounces that drive the 5% and 10% thresholds above.
Suppression is the safety net: a suppressed recipient is never emailed again by any campaign. Warmbly suppresses automatically on a bounce, a spam complaint, or an unsubscribe, because once someone has bounced or complained the safest response is to stop, not to keep collecting negative signals.
Bounces are detected from the delivery-status report the recipient's server sends back. Only permanent failures (5.x.x, such as a nonexistent address) record a bounce and suppress; temporary ones (4.x.x, such as a full mailbox or greylisting) never do. This works the same for Gmail and Microsoft Graph mailboxes, where the send reports success and the bounce arrives later.
How to read it
- Start with the headline numbers. Bounce at
5%and complaints at0.1%are the highlighted danger lines. - If a rate looks off, switch the chart to that metric and find the spike day. It usually points at one campaign or one imported list.
- Check placement by provider and by domain to see whether mail actually reaches inboxes.
- Read the at-risk lists. The chips show which senders Warmbly is already acting on.
- Slow down anything in Watch and let it recover. Leave Quarantine and Blocked out of sending until they requalify.
The habit that matters: keep complaint rate and spam placement low. A clean reputation at modest volume beats high volume with rising complaints every time.