What this article helps you do
Understand why emails can reach spam and what to review to improve your sending reputation and inbox placement.
How sender reputation works
Email marketing is a powerful tool. However, success depends heavily on email reputation, specifically, your sender reputation.
Snappy Kraken uses shared sender pools: groups of sending addresses whose reputation is influenced by the activity of the senders using them.
To understand how this works, think of Snappy Krakens' sender reputation like a swimming pool that everyone is using. Each sender's email activity contributes to the cleanliness of the sending pool, just as a swimmer contributes to the cleanliness of a swimming pool.
Understanding Sender Pools
A sender pool is a group of shared addresses used to send emails. Just like swimmers sharing a pool, everyone in the pool affects the water quality. If one swimmer jumps in covered in mud, the whole pool gets murky, and its reputation suffers. Similarly, if one sender in a sender pool sends spammy emails or targets bad addresses, the entire sender pool's reputation suffers.
Clean Pool (High-Quality IP Pool): This is like a sparkling, well-maintained pool. When you send emails from a clean IP pool with high engagement rates, low bounce rates, and minimal spam complaints, your emails are more likely to reach recipients' inboxes.
Dirty Pool (Low-Quality IP Pool): This resembles a murky, debris-filled pool. If your emails are sent from an IP pool with poor engagement metrics or high bounce rates, mailbox providers may flag your emails as spam, reducing deliverability.
How to Keep Our Pool Clean
This is where clean email lists come in. Maintaining a clean list—full of valid, engaged recipients—is like showering before entering the pool. It keeps the water (your email reputation) clear and healthy. Dirty email lists, on the other hand, include outdated, unverified, or disengaged addresses. Sending to these increases bounce rates and spam complaints, and triggers spam filters—just like tracking in dirt ruins the pool for everyone.
Your Role
- Clean Swimmers (Engaged Subscribers): Just as swimmers should shower before entering the pool to keep the water clean, your email list should consist of engaged subscribers who regularly open and interact with your emails. This helps maintain a positive sender reputation. Before uploading your email list, we highly recommend that you scrub it of bad or expired email addresses.
- Dirty Swimmers (Inactive or Invalid Emails): Allowing unengaged or invalid email addresses to remain on your list is akin to letting dirty swimmers into the pool. These can increase bounce rates and spam complaints, negatively impacting your IP pool's reputation.
In short, a clean pool (sender pool) depends on clean swimmers (senders) using clean towels (email lists). Respect the pool; it’ll reward you with higher engagement and a strong sender reputation.
Why spam placement happens
Mailbox providers decide where emails appear using multiple signals, including sending-domain setup, sender reputation, message content, and past recipient behavior. No single setting or metric guarantees inbox placement.
A healthy Deliverability Rate does not mean every delivered email reached the main inbox. A message can be accepted by a receiving server and still appear in spam.
What to check first
1. Confirm your sending-domain setup
Make sure your sending domain is properly connected and verified. DNS setup helps providers recognize that Snappy Kraken is authorized to send on your domain’s behalf. If you are unsure about DNS changes, work with your domain administrator.
2. Review domain health
Check the domain’s Deliverability Rate, Bounce Rate, and Complaint Rate. A red alert icon indicates a rate outside the healthy range.
Remember that these rates cover the last 30 days and update nightly. If several advisors share a domain, the rates include all sending activity for that domain—not only one advisor’s emails.
3. Clean your email list
- Scrub bad or expired email addresses before uploading a list.
- Review outdated, invalid, and disengaged contacts rather than continuing to send to them without review.
- Prioritize subscribers who regularly open and interact with your emails.
- Investigate increased bounces or complaints rather than treating them as a normal result of sending.
4. Review the message itself
Mailbox providers also evaluate content and formatting. Try shorter, more conversational copy, natural subject lines, and fewer images or repeated calls to action. These changes may help, but they do not guarantee a particular inbox location.
Spam and Promotions are different
A Promotions tab is not the same as a spam folder. Promotional layouts can make messages more likely to appear in Promotions, where recipients may notice them less often. If your main concern is fewer opens or clicks, use Why did my email opens or clicks drop?
When to contact Support
Contact Support if spam placement continues after reviewing domain setup, list quality, and content. Include:
- The sending domain and affected sending address
- When the issue started and a recent sending date
- An example subject line and email body
- The audience or segment used
- Any observed domain-health alerts
- The recipient provider and reported folder placement, if known
Share only the contact information necessary for the investigation.