Help · Settings

Sending reputation and deliverability

Every email you send carries your store's own name. The large inboxes decide whether it lands in front of people by what they have seen from that name before — that is deliverability, and a sending reputation is what it rests on. This page explains, in full, how your store builds that record — your own sending domain, the daily number, how fast it grows, what can make it faster, what makes it stop, and what you will see on screen at each step. There are no surprises in it.

You will find it under Settings → Email, in a section called Sending reputation. It appears after your first send, because until then there is nothing to show — or, if the sending history you imported earns a faster start, as soon as it has been read.

No person at Carpe Messaging approves or refuses your store's sending. Nobody here decides how fast you start, when a pause ends, or whether you may send. Your store's own sending record decides all of it, by the rules on this page, the same way for every store.

Your own sending domain

Every store here sends from its own domain, from its first email, because the large inboxes judge email by the domain that signs it. Setting it up is one errand on Settings → Domain: the app prepares every record your domain needs, and most domains are ready within an hour.

Some email platforms let you send from their domain and treat your own as an optional extra. Here every store sends from its own domain, from its first email, because that is where good deliverability starts. The large inboxes judge email by the domain that signs it, and a sending reputation belongs to the domain that earned it. Sending from your own domain means every good campaign builds a record that is yours — one that stays with your store and goes with you wherever you send from.

Good deliverability is not hard to reach. It rests on a few basic practices, and the app handles most of them for you. Setting up your domain is one errand, on Settings → Domain. The app prepares every record your domain needs, set up the way the large inboxes ask every sender to set up theirs:

• Signs your email — the records that let an inbox check that an email really came from your domain and was not changed on the way (DKIM).
• Delivery reports — two records on send.yourdomain.com, your return path. They say which servers may send email for your domain (SPF), and they bring bounces and spam complaints back, so the app can record each one and that address is never emailed again.
• Your links — click.yourdomain.com for the links in your emails and sms.yourdomain.com for the links in your texts, so every link carries your name rather than ours. You can choose other words for them.

Every one of these records goes on a name under your domain, such as send.yourdomain.com, never on yourdomain.com itself. Your website and the email you already send and receive keep working exactly as they do now.

If your DNS provider supports automatic setup, the page shows a button that names it. You sign in to your DNS provider, check the list and approve, and it adds every record for you. Your login never passes through Carpe Messaging, and nothing here can change your DNS settings afterwards. If it does not, the page lists each record with a copy button beside its name and its value, and adding them by hand takes about five minutes. If you bought your domain through Shopify, you add them in Shopify.

Either way, the app checks for you. Each record shows whether it has been found yet, and the app looks again every few minutes, so you can close the page. Most domains are ready within an hour; a few take up to 72 hours. The moment yours is confirmed, your store can start sending, and its email comes from your own domain from the very first message. The Your sending domain help page walks through every step.

One record the app never touches is your DMARC record — the policy that tells inboxes what to do with email that fails these checks. A domain can have only one, Shopify adds one to domains bought through it, and a second would break every email your domain sends, including Shopify's own. Whatever your domain has is left exactly as it is. If it has none yet, adding one is worth doing: the large inboxes ask it of everyone who sends email in volume.

Why every store warms up

Every store starts at a daily number the inboxes can trust and grows it on clean sending days. A domain the inboxes have never seen, suddenly sending to thousands of people, looks exactly like the senders they are built to stop.

Every store sends from its own domain — the part of your From address after the @. The inboxes your people read in keep a record of each domain: how much it sends, how much of it arrives, and how often somebody marks it as spam. A domain they have never seen has no record yet, and a new sender that suddenly sends to thousands of people looks, to an inbox, exactly like the senders they are built to stop.

So every store starts at a pace the inboxes can trust and grows from there.

It cannot be disabled, and that protects you. Your email leaves through one sending account that every store on Carpe Messaging shares. A bad day for one store must never become a bad day for all of them — including yours. The warm-up is included, like every other part of keeping your email out of the spam folder. There is nothing to buy and nothing to enable.

The standard pace

Your store has a daily number: how many marketing emails can go out today. You build nothing and change nothing for it. The app counts, and the number grows on its own evidence.

• On your first day it is 500. If your store was already sending through Carpe Messaging, it is the largest single day of your own marketing email in the last 7 days, whichever of the two is larger.
• It grows by half again after each clean sending day — a day whose email arrived without trouble and that used at least 70 of every 100 emails in the day's number. A day you barely send on teaches the inboxes little, so it does not move the number.
• A day is counted on your store's own clock, the time zone your store uses in Shopify.

A worked example. A store sending one campaign to 8,000 people reaches 500 people on the first day, then 750, 1,125, 1,688, 2,532 and 3,798 on each clean day after — so the campaign reaches everyone in six days, or seven with the one-day pause described under "Who goes first". These are best estimates: a day that does not go cleanly moves them later. Once the warm-up finishes, your whole list gets each campaign in one day.

The section shows the number in words at the top:

Your sending reputation is being built.

Below it you see today's number, how much of it is used so far, what it becomes after the next clean day, and a chart of your daily number over time.

Automations count toward the day's number, and they are never made to wait. A welcome email that goes out this morning leaves a little less room for a campaign this afternoon, because both come from the same domain — but the welcome email itself always goes when it is due — unless the shared sending account is being protected, below. Order emails, and other email a person asked for, are not counted at all.

A faster start from your imported history

If you imported your store from another email platform with your email history — the Settings → Imports connection — you do not need to do or send anything. When the import finishes, the app reads the sending record it imported and decides your pace from it. There is nothing to upload, no form to fill in, and nobody to wait for.

What the app reads

From the history you imported, over the 30 days and the 90 days before the import finished:

• Emails delivered.
• Hard bounces — emails turned away because the address does not exist or refuses mail for good. A soft bounce, such as a full inbox, is a delivery problem for that one day, not a dead address, and is not counted.
• Spam complaints — people who pressed the spam button.
• Which domain the email was sent from.
• Your biggest single day of delivered email in the last 90 days.

Opens are never part of it. Some inboxes open every email the moment it arrives, so an open says more about the inbox than about the person.

What earns the faster start

All of these, together:

• At least 500 emails delivered in the last 30 days, so you are sending now, not once.
• At least 2,000 delivered over the last 90 days. Below that, one spam complaint is already 1 in 2,000, and a spam rate cannot be read at all.
• Fewer than 2 of every 100 emails bounced hard, in both the 30-day and the 90-day window.
• Fewer than 1 in every 2,000 people marked your email as spam, in both windows.
• The same domain. The history has to have been sent from a domain you have connected here. A sending reputation belongs to the domain that earned it.

Where those lines come from. Gmail publishes its own limit for senders: keep the spam rate below 1 in 1,000 and never let it reach 3 in 1,000. Yahoo Mail publishes the same 3 in 1,000 ceiling. We ask for half of Gmail's line — 1 in 2,000 — because the inboxes count spam against a smaller number of emails than we can see, so a rate that looks fine on our side can look worse on theirs. No inbox provider publishes a bounce limit; fewer than 2 in 100 is the line the industry works to, and it is the same line at which your daily number here would stop growing.

What the faster start is

For most lists the faster start reaches your whole audience in three sending days:

Your first day is never bigger than the biggest day the inboxes have already seen from you. A quarter of a very large list could be far more than you have ever sent in a day, and a sudden jump like that is what the inboxes distrust. So the first day is the smaller of the two — and never under 500.

And no day is more than twice the day before it. On a small list the three days above already double at most. On a large one, the days in between double until everyone is reached, so a big list takes a day or two longer.

Three examples:

• A list of 6,450 whose biggest day was 3,000: 2,000 on the first day, 3,225 on the second, everyone on the third.
• A list of 50,000 whose biggest day was 8,000: 8,000, then 16,000, then 32,000, then everyone — four days.
• A list of 500,000 whose biggest day was 60,000: 60,000, then 120,000, 240,000 and 480,000, then everyone — five days.

The three numbers are fixed by your first campaign after the history is read, from that campaign's audience. A second campaign inside those days shares the same day's number instead of starting its own. Until that first campaign, your daily number is 2,000, or your biggest recent day if that is smaller.

Every rule under "When the number stops" still applies, unchanged. A faster start follows the same rules as every other start — a store whose first day draws complaints stops on its first day, exactly like any other.

What you see

When your history earns the faster start, the section says so with the numbers — for example, "your first campaign can go to about 8,000 people — the most you sent in a day recently — and to everyone within 3 days" — under this heading:

Your sending history came with you.

When it does not, the section says why in one sentence — fewer than 500 emails in the last month, too few to read a spam rate from, too many bounces, too many spam complaints, a different domain, or that your own recent sending from here has already had more bounces or complaints than a faster start can carry — under this heading, and your number grows at the standard pace from your own sends:

Your sending starts at the standard pace.

Either way it ends with:

Nothing needs sending in. Nobody at Carpe Messaging decides this — your own sending record does.

Your sending from here always counts for more than the history you imported. If campaign email has already been paused for bounces or complaints here, or your recent sends here have more of them than the lines above, your store keeps the standard pace — the history cannot outvote what your own sends showed. A store whose warm-up has already finished is left as it is.

If you did not import a history

Nothing is asked of you. Your store starts at the standard pace and grows on its own sends. There is no upload and no review to apply for.

Who goes first

When a campaign's audience is bigger than what is left of today's number, the campaign goes out over the following days. It reaches your most recently active people first, and everyone else as your daily number grows.

A campaign bigger than today’s number goes to your most recently active people first and to everyone else over the following days. Everyone in the audience gets it.

Nobody in the audience is dropped. The order is the only thing that changes:

1. People who opened or clicked one of your emails in the last 180 days go first. That includes the history you imported from the email platform you came from.
2. Everyone else follows by how recently they were active with your store. Orders and site visits count, not only email, so someone who shops with you but never opens goes ahead of someone who has done nothing at all.
3. People with no activity of any kind go last.

Inbox providers judge a new sender by its first days, and the people glad to hear from you are the ones whose reactions they watch most closely. The first time the warm-up reaches people with no recent opens or clicks, your number stays where it is for one day, to confirm those sends arrive and draw no spam marks before it grows again.

Opens never decide how fast your number grows, or whether it stops. Only emails that did not arrive and spam marks do. A later day that is opened less, but arrives cleanly and draws no spam marks, is a clean day like any other.

The campaign builder tells you before you send, and only when it applies. If today's number covers your whole audience, it says nothing at all. When you schedule a larger send, the builder shows the date it is expected to finish by. That date is a best estimate, not a promise: a day that does not go cleanly moves it later.

What you can do:

• Don't make a big date, like Black Friday, your first send here. Start two to three weeks before it with your ordinary campaigns.
• Keep sending from the email platform you are leaving until you switch.

The numbers you see

The section shows your last 7 days in four numbers: delivered, did not arrive, marked as spam, and opened. Only the emails that did not arrive and the spam marks can move your number.

• Delivered — emails that reached an inbox.
• Did not arrive — emails the receiving inbox turned away, usually because the address no longer exists. The app records each one, and that address is never emailed again.
• Marked as spam — people who pressed the spam button on an email you sent them. They are never emailed again either.
• Opened — the share of those delivered emails that were opened, shown for your interest only.

Opens are shown for your interest and never move your number — some inboxes open mail on the reader’s behalf.

The numbers in that section cover your last 7 days. The rates that stop or hold your number are read over a shorter window, your last 3 days of sends, and the reason on screen says so. Only marketing email is counted: order and account emails are not part of your number and are not in these figures. The rates for emails that did not arrive and for spam marks are counted against emails delivered, the same way the rates that stop or hold your number are. When nothing has been delivered yet, the section says so instead of printing a confident zero.

When the number stops

Most days, your number simply grows. There are two points where it does not, and both are set well below the point where the inboxes themselves start to refuse mail.

Your number stays where it is when, in your sends from the last 3 days:

• 2 or more of every 100 emails did not arrive, or
• 5 or more of every 10,000 people marked an email as spam, or
• within your first 2,000 deliveries, 1 or more of every 100 emails did not arrive.

Today's number still goes out. The next increase waits until your last send has settled and the result is clean, and then growth picks up again by itself.

Today’s number stays where it is while your last send settles.

Campaign email pauses when, in your sends from the last 3 days:

• 3 or more of every 100 emails did not arrive, or
• 8 or more of every 10,000 people marked an email as spam, or
• anybody marked one of your first 2,000 emails as spam.

Campaign email has stopped for now.

The section says that first, then names the reason in plain words and the date campaign email starts again. Automations keep going throughout.

How it starts again — on its own

Nobody has to restart it, and nobody can. It starts again by itself, on a schedule that gets more careful each time:

Three days is how long it takes for anything still on its way back from those sends to arrive; a week is more than two of those. The restart goes to your most engaged people first, because the send order is always most engaged first. If that restart arrives cleanly, your number grows from it one clean day at a time, never more than doubling in a day — never straight back to where it paused. If it does not, the next wait is longer. A store that keeps pausing ends up sending one small restart a month, never sending freely.

Every campaign that is waiting picks up where it left off, and nobody in it is dropped — a campaign waits rather than ends.

Every campaign that is waiting picks up where it left off, and nobody in it is dropped.

A campaign that was part way through sending when this happened shows Waiting at the top of its page until campaign email starts again.

Protecting the shared sending account

Every store's email leaves through one shared sending account, and the email provider behind it steps in when that account's bounces or spam complaints get too high — at 5 in 100 emails bouncing or 1 in 1,000 marked as spam, it puts the whole account under review. So the app watches the account's own numbers over the last 7 days, every store's together, including stores whose warm-up has finished.

• When the whole account reaches 2 in 100 bouncing, or 1 in 2,000 marked as spam — well before the provider's line — campaign email pauses for the stores whose own recent sends are driving it, the biggest contributor first, and only as many as it takes. A store whose own sends are clean is never paused, however much it sends.
• When the account is back under three quarters of those lines, every paused store starts again on its own.

If this happens to your store, Settings → Email says so, and your waiting campaigns pick up where they left off — nobody in them is dropped. Marketing email from your automations waits too, and goes out on its own when campaign email starts again; nobody is taken out of an automation for it. Order emails keep going. Nobody at Carpe Messaging enables or disables this; the account's own numbers do.

When it finishes

The warm-up finishes when your daily number covers your whole audience, after at least three clean sending days. From then on there is no daily number at all.

The section then says:

Your sending reputation is established. Your whole audience is reachable in a single day.

The one thing you can do to help

Send good campaigns to people who want them. Every email somebody is glad to get — one they read, click, or buy from — is what your number grows on, and the people who asked to hear from you are the ones most glad to. That is the whole of it. Everything else, the app does for you.

Dedicated IP addresses

Below 100,000 marketing emails a month, a shared IP address gives your email better deliverability than one of your own. Your domain's reputation, which you are building now, goes with you either way.

Some senders ask for a sending IP address of their own, used by nobody else — a dedicated IP address. The inboxes judge an IP address by steady, regular sending over a long time; one that goes quiet between campaigns loses its record, and a store that sends a few campaigns a month is quiet most of the time. A shared IP address sends steadily all day, every day, for many stores, and keeps a record your email benefits from.

The point where a dedicated IP address starts to help is 100,000 marketing emails a month, every month, for three months in a row. You can check your own sends against that number. Until your store reaches it, a shared IP address is the better one for your email, and your domain's own reputation, which you are building now, goes with you either way.