Email deliverability

Deliverability is a partnership. We run the mail servers, sign your messages, and keep the technical reputation clean. You write the emails and choose who gets them. When both sides do their part, mail lands in the inbox. When a message goes to spam even though every record on your DNS tab is green, the cause is almost always on the content or audience side - and no DNS record can rescue a bad email.

This page explains exactly who does what, so you know where to look before opening a support ticket titled "your platform sends my mail to spam".

Who does what

Area	Handled by MicroApps	Handled by you
SPF, DKIM, DMARC	Generated and configured	Publish the records at your DNS provider, exactly as shown
Server reputation (PTR, HELO, TLS)	Yes	Nothing
Bounce tracking, unsubscribe headers and enforcement	Yes	Keep an eye on the numbers
What the email says, how it looks, who receives it	Nothing - we deliver what you write	Everything
How often and how much you send	Nothing	Everything

What we handle

These are set up automatically when you enable email on a domain. Your only job is publishing the DNS records, which is step 2 of Setting up email - copy and paste, no improvisation.

• SPF - authorizes our servers to send on behalf of your domain. Without it, receivers may reject your messages outright.
• DKIM - cryptographically signs each message so receivers can verify nobody altered it in transit. Keys are generated and signing is configured for you.
• DMARC - tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF or DKIM. We generate the record with p=quarantine. Once you are confident all legitimate mail is passing, upgrade it to p=reject at your DNS provider, as below.
• PTR record (rDNS) - our mail servers have reverse DNS that matches their hostnames. Receivers check this; ours passes.
• HELO hostname - our servers introduce themselves with hostnames that match their PTR records.
• Unsubscribe headers - List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post are added to all outbound mail automatically. Gmail and Yahoo require these for bulk senders; you get them for free.
• Unsubscribe enforcement - mail to addresses that opted out is blocked before it leaves. You cannot accidentally email someone who unsubscribed, no matter how enthusiastic your newsletter script is.
• Bounce tracking - bounces are tracked automatically via VERP and surfaced in your email metrics.
• Standard headers - Message-ID, Date, MIME-Version, and Reply-To are set if your sending code forgot them.

Upgrading DMARC to p=reject

p=quarantine tells receivers to treat failures as suspicious. p=reject tells them to throw the mail away. Move to it once you are confident every system that sends as your domain is passing SPF or DKIM, and not before.

1. Open Domains in the console, or click Domains in the side panel.
2. Click the domain's name in the table, then click the DNS tab.
3. Find the row named _dmarc, marked with a DMARC chip. Its Type column says TXT, because that is the record type you publish.
4. At your DNS provider, edit that TXT record and change p=quarantine to p=reject. Leave the rest of the value alone.
5. Save at your provider, then click Recheck DNS back on the DNS tab.

The row stays Verified. We accept any well-formed DMARC policy, so a customized record does not fall out of verification.

What only you control

This is the part where mail goes to spam and it is not our fault. Authentication proves the mail came from you. It says nothing about whether anyone wants it.

Your list

• Send only to people who asked. That is the entire science of deliverability in one sentence. Everything below is a footnote to it.
• Never buy a list. A purchased list of 50,000 "verified leads" also contains spam traps - addresses that exist purely to catch senders who mail people who never signed up. Hit a few and receivers will file everything you send, including the genuinely good stuff, under spam.
• Use double opt-in for signups. It filters out typos, bots, and people who typed a stranger's address into your form.
• Retire old addresses. A list you have not mailed in a year is full of dead mailboxes and recycled spam traps. Sending "we miss you!" to all of them at once is how sender reputations die.

Your content

• Send plain text alongside HTML. HTML-only mail is penalized by spam filters. If you send through SMTP from your own app, include both bodies.
• Write the subject the email deserves. "FINAL NOTICE!!! ACT NOW" goes to spam because it should. Misleading subjects also drive spam complaints, which are worse than filters.
• Avoid the classics - all-caps, walls of exclamation marks, image-only emails, link shorteners, and a From name that changes every week. Spam filters have seen every one of these tricks since 2004.
• Match your links to your words. Text that says one domain and links to another is phishing behavior, and filters treat it as such.
• Use a consistent From address. And avoid noreply@ for anything you want people to engage with - asking for engagement while refusing replies sends a mixed message, to humans and filters alike.

Your sending behavior

• Warm up new domains. If your domain has never sent before, start with low volume and grow it over 2-4 weeks. Going from zero to 20,000 emails on day one looks exactly like what spammers do, because it is.
• Avoid volume spikes. Steady beats bursty. Receivers rate-limit and greylist senders whose volume jumps around.
• Watch engagement. If nobody opens your mail, receivers notice and start filing it accordingly. Sending less, to people who care, outperforms sending more to everyone.

Before you blame us

A quick checklist that resolves most "my mail goes to spam" tickets without a ticket. Work through it in order.

1. Is every record on the DNS tab verified? Open Domains, click the domain's name, and click the DNS tab. Every row's Status should read Verified. If the rows chipped SPF, DKIM or DMARC read Pending, fix that first - it is the one item on this page that is genuinely on the plumbing side, and it usually means a record was never published or was edited by hand. Click Recheck DNS after correcting it at your provider.
2. Rejected or spam-foldered? A rejection comes back as a bounce message and names its reason, so read it. Spam-foldering is silent and is almost always content or reputation.
3. Test the message itself. Send it to mail-tester.com and read the score breakdown. It will tell you whether the problem is authentication (us) or content (you) in about ten seconds.
4. Check Google Postmaster Tools. Register your domain and look at the spam-rate and reputation graphs. If your domain reputation is low, revisit the list and content sections above.
5. Check your bounce rate. Open Emails in the console, or click Emails in the side panel, then click the Analytics tab. The Bounced tile shows the count for the selected range with the rate underneath it, next to Sent and Received. Bounce rate above 2%, or complaint rate above 0.1%, is a list-quality problem, and receivers punish it. For one mailbox rather than the whole account, click its address on the Email Accounts tab and open its Activity tab.

If authentication is green, the bounce message is clean, and mail-tester scores you well but a specific receiver still filters you - then yes, open a ticket, and we will dig into it with you.

Reputation numbers to live by

• Bounce rate below 2%. Above that, clean your list.
• Complaint rate below 0.1%. That is one complaint per thousand emails. High complaint rates damage sender reputation faster than anything else on this page.
• Warm-up period of 2-4 weeks for domains new to sending.

Advanced (optional)

• BIMI - display your brand logo next to your emails in the inbox. Requires DMARC at p=reject and a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for Gmail support.
• MTA-STS - enforces TLS for inbound mail to your domain, preventing downgrade attacks.
• TLS-RPT - reports TLS connection failures to your domain so you can diagnose delivery issues.

You add these at your own DNS provider. They do not appear on the DNS tab, and we do not check them.

See also

• Setting up email
• Emails concept
• Emails API