Deliverability
Overview
What Kula enforces and what is up to you
Inbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo…) decide where an email lands from two things: whether the sender is authenticated, and how recipients reacted to what that sender sent before.
What Kula does
| Mechanism | What it prevents |
|---|---|
| Your own domain, required. Every email is signed with your DKIM key and sent from your verified domain. Nothing can be sent before verification. | Emails rejected or sent to spam for missing authentication. |
Your own tracking domain. Every link in your emails, unsubscribe and preferences included, goes through your link. subdomain. | Links on a domain shared with other senders, which filters judge by the worst of them. |
| A reputation that's yours alone. Each space has its own sending reputation, never pooled with other customers. | Paying for someone else's spam. |
| Automatic warm-up. A new domain starts at about 1,000 marketing emails a day and doubles day after day. | A sudden burst from an unknown domain, which providers treat as spam. |
| Contacts under review. Contacts who have never opened get a capped share of each send until results are healthy. | An old or purchased list dragging your domain into spam. |
| Reputation watch. Complaints and hard bounces are measured continuously, and marketing pauses itself when they pass the alert thresholds. | Being blocked by inbox providers, which takes weeks to recover from. |
| Bounces and complaints handled. Addresses that bounce or complain are suppressed automatically. | Sending again to addresses that hurt your reputation. |
| One-click unsubscribe. Every marketing email carries the unsubscribe headers Gmail and Yahoo require, and a visible unsubscribe link. | Complaints from people who can't find how to leave. |
| A plain-text version with every email. | Rejection by providers that refuse HTML-only email. |
| Transactional on its own stream. Password resets and receipts skip warm-up, import review and marketing pauses. | A newsletter problem blocking the emails your app depends on. |
What stays in your hands
- Send to people who asked. Use a signup form with double opt-in when you can. Never import a purchased or scraped list: it breaks our acceptable use policy.
- Send what they signed up for, at the rhythm they expect. A list that hears from you once a year forgets you.
- Make leaving easy. An unsubscribe is far better for your reputation than a spam complaint.
- Clean out the silent. Contacts who haven't opened in six months or more cost you reputation. A segment on "not opened within 180 days" finds them.
Where to see how you're doing
The Deliverability page shows your reputation, the warm-up of each domain, and how each inbox provider treats your emails. Read the report.