Reputation recovery

Triage first

Before you start a recovery plan, decide whether the mailbox is worth recovering at all. Three questions:

1. Is the mailbox tied to a person whose name needs to be on the email? If not, retire it and warm a new one.
2. Has the domain been blocklisted at major receivers? Check tools like MXToolbox blacklist lookup, Talos, and Spamhaus. If yes, the recovery work is at the domain level too.
3. Is the placement issue from this mailbox alone, or is it a domain-wide problem? Check placement on other mailboxes on the same domain.

Stop the bleeding

• Pause every campaign sending from the affected mailbox immediately.
• Remove the mailbox from active sender pools in your campaigns.
• If the mailbox is in the warmup pool, let the platform's auto-quarantine kick in (it likely already has).
• Do not "send a few test emails to gauge". Every additional send while reputation is poor is another data point in the wrong column.

Audit the basics

1. SPF: single record? Under 10 DNS lookups? Includes every service that sends as you?
2. DKIM: selector resolves? Key length ≥ 1024? Rotated within the last year?
3. DMARC: exists? Aligned? Reporting address receives mail? Policy appropriate for your maturity?
4. PTR: sending IP has a reverse DNS record that resolves back?
5. Mailbox content: review the last 90 days of sent mail for any HTML-heavy, image-only, or link-bait messages.

Fix anything that's broken before you start the volume work. Recovery on a misconfigured domain is futile. See SPF, DKIM and DMARC for the details.

The recovery ramp

Treat the mailbox like a brand-new one. The ramp:

• Days 1–7: warmup only, capped at 5/day. No cold sends.
• Days 8–14: warmup at 10/day. Still no cold sends.
• Days 15–28: warmup at 15–25/day, ramp +1/day. Begin a very small "soft" cold sequence to highly engaged, low-risk recipients (warm replies are fine).
• Days 29–42: warmup at 30–40/day. Cold sequences capped at half the normal mailbox budget.
• Day 43+: evaluate. If placement is above 90% on a 20-message probe sample and complaint rate is below 0.03%, return the mailbox to the normal cold cap.

Send to your safest recipients first

The first cold sends after recovery should go to:

• Recipients who replied positively in the past 6 months.
• Contacts at organisations you have customer relationships with.
• Subscribers (newsletter, podcast, blog): addresses you've already had positive engagement from.

Reply-rich first sends rebuild engagement signal fast. Cold sends to brand-new contact lists during recovery are the easiest way to undo the work.

Content rules during recovery

• Plain text only.
• No tracking pixels.
• One link maximum, and only if necessary.
• Subject under 60 characters, no all-caps, no emojis.
• Different subject and opening line per recipient (not "Hi {{first_name}}, just wanted to follow up" 1,000 times).
• Personal signature with full name and a phone number you can be reached at.

When to give up and switch

If after 8 weeks of disciplined recovery the mailbox still hovers below 80% placement, the address has likely picked up reputation damage that won't reverse. Options:

• Retire the mailbox and create a new one on the same domain, then re-warm it from scratch.
• Move cold sending to a new sub-domain (e.g. outreach2.acme.com) and start with fresh SPF/DKIM/DMARC.
• If the whole domain is the problem, register a new sending sub-domain and warm it for 6 weeks before reusing.

Reputation recovery is mostly patience. The temptation is always to "test with a few sends". Resist it. A recovery plan that runs for 6 weeks of warmup-only beats one that gets impatient at week three and crashes back into quarantine.