Sending

Deliverability and sending rules

What keeps your email in the inbox, and the rules every Percy account follows.

Every Percy account sends through the same email infrastructure. One bad list can hurt everyone's deliverability, so Percy protects your reputation and everyone else's with a few rules.

#What helps you land in the inbox

  • Your own verified domain (DKIM, SPF and DMARC). See Sending domain.
  • Double opt-in on your forms: only real, willing people on your list.
  • Automatic suppression: addresses that bounce or complain are never emailed again.
  • One-click unsubscribe in every email, as Gmail and Yahoo require of bulk senders.
  • A real postal address in every footer, as anti-spam laws require.
  • Sending only what people expect: the topic and frequency your form promised.

#Rules

  • Only email people who asked to hear from you. No bought, rented, scraped or "borrowed" lists, and no adding people because you met them once.
  • A new sender's first big campaign goes out in two steps. Until you've sent about 5,000 emails, a campaign to more than 1,000 people sends to the first 1,000, then the rest 20 minutes later. Problems with a list show up early, before they reach everyone.
  • Sending pauses if your bounce or spam-complaint rate gets too high. Over the last 7 days (with at least 200 emails sent), a bounce rate above 4% or a complaint rate above 0.08% pauses sending for your account. You get an email explaining why. Your forms keep working and nothing is deleted. Reply to that email and we'll look at it with you and turn sending back on.
  • Our email provider watches each account too. Amazon SES tracks every Percy account separately, including spam reports and feedback from mailbox providers that we don't see. If it pauses yours, Percy pauses sending the same way and tells you why. That keeps one account's problems from holding up everyone else's newsletters.

The full rules, including what you can't send, are in the Acceptable use policy.

#If your bounce rate is high

Old lists are the usual reason: addresses that worked three years ago often don't now. Before importing an old list, send to your most recent subscribers first, or ask them to resubscribe through a form.

This page as Markdown: https://percymail.com/docs/deliverability.md. All the docs: https://percymail.com/llms.txt.