Not every email sent is an email delivered. While some failures are due to simple technical errors, many are blocked by Mailbox Providers or corporate security systems designed to protect users from unwanted content (SPAM).
SPAM filters are dynamic and highly sensitive. If enough recipients flag your content, providers will begin blocking your emails across the board, even to those who actively want to hear from you. High deliverability is not a "set and forget" feature; it is a dynamic partnership between Agillic’s robust technical infrastructure and your responsible sending behavior.
High deliverability is the result of Agillic’s technical setup combined with your responsible behaviour. By maintaining clean lists and respecting recipient engagement, you ensure your brand stays out of the "Junk" folder and in front of your customers.
Here is how Agillic protects your reputation and how you can optimize your strategy for long-term success.
What Agillic Provides
Agillic operates a proprietary, high-performance delivery infrastructure designed to navigate the complex filtering systems of major providers like Gmail, Outlook, and iCloud.
Proprietary Infrastructure & "Warm" IP Clusters
Agillic operates its own native mail-server clusters. By utilizing shared IP ranges with a constant flow of legitimate traffic, we ensure our IPs remain "warm."
The Benefit: You can execute large campaigns or sudden volume increases without the "cold start" period usually required to build reputation.
Bad Neighbor Risk: Modern deliverability prioritizes Domain Reputation. As long as you maintain good habits and use mandatory authentication, your "sender score" is shielded from the actions of other senders on the shared cluster.
Separate Transactional Streams
We route critical transactional emails (e.g., receipts, password resets) through dedicated servers separate from marketing traffic. This ensures that even if a marketing campaign sees lower engagement, your essential one-to-one communications remain unaffected.
Mandatory Authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC)
Trust is the currency of the inbox. To protect your brand, Agillic requires all sender domains to be verified using industry-standard protocols:
- SPF (Sender Policy Framework): Authorizes Agillic to send on your behalf.
- DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail): Adds a cryptographic signature to prove your email wasn't tampered with in transit.
- DMARC: A vital policy layer that tells ISPs how to handle mail that fails SPF or DKIM.
Note: Major providers like Gmail and Yahoo require valid DMARC records for all bulk senders. Agillic makes this mandatory to prevent spoofing and boost your reputation.
The "System Pause" Safety Net (Fuses)
Our platform includes automated safeguards. If the system detects a misconfigured flow or an abnormal spike in bounce rates that could threaten your domain reputation, it will automatically pause the send-out, allowing you to correct the error before long-term damage occurs.
Your responsibilities
While Agillic provides the vehicle, your sending habits are the main factor of deliverability rates. ISPs today look beyond technical setup; they focus heavily on recipient engagement.
Permission-Based Marketing (Consent)
Deliverability starts before you hit "send." In compliance with GDPR and global best practices, always ensure you have explicit, prior consent from your recipients. Sending to "stale" lists or purchased data is the fastest way to trigger spam filters and damage your deliverability across all your campaigns causing reputational damage that can be very hard to remedy.
Bounce Management
Agillic automates the heavy lifting of list hygiene, but it requires your active management:
Hard Bounces
Hard Bounces occur when the email or domain does not exist or the recipient's email client won't accept emails. For this reason Agillic won't attempt to send any further email communications to this specific recipient email in the specific flow or any other flows including the same recipient. Recipient data is updated with VALID_EMAIL = False and HARD_BOUNCE increments by 1 (link).
IMPORTANT: If you include recipients with VALID_EMAIL = False in your flows then your delivery rate will drop as the number of recipients that hard bounce increases. We recommend you either correct wrong emails, or exclude (delete) recipients with VALID_EMAIL = False from all flows.
Soft Bounces
We monitor temporary issues (like full inboxes). By default if a recipient soft-bounces 1,000 times, the system will stop further attempts to protect your sender reputation score and minimise risk of being blocked by the ISP. You can adjust the number of soft bounces as you want.
Pruning Inactive Users
We recommend using Agillic’s Inactive Email settings. If a user hasn't engaged with your mails in a long time, they are less likely to engage and more likely to mark your mail as spam. The default inactive setting is that a recipient has INACTIVE_EMAIL set to TRUE when the recipient has received at least 5 emails over a period of 90 days and not opened (or clicked) a single one of these emails. You can change these settings. Periodically removing these users improves your "Open Rate" percentage and sends a strong signal to ISPs that your content is wanted.
Seamless Unsubscribing
An unsubscribe is much better than a spam complaint. For this reason every marketing email must include a clear unsubscribe link. Agillic also automatically includes the "List-Unsubscribe" header. This allows users to opt-out via the "Unsubscribe" button built into their email client (like Gmail or Outlook), which is viewed favorably by ISPs as a sign of a transparent, honest sender.
Relevance & Frequency
Sending "more" does not always mean "better." Use Agillic’s personalisation and segmentation tools to ensure that you are only sending content to those who find it relevant. Over-mailing leads to "inbox fatigue," resulting in lower engagement and higher complaint rates.
High deliverability is the result of Agillic’s Technical Excellence combined with Your Strategic Responsibility. By maintaining a clean list, respecting consent, and utilising Agillic’s authenticated infrastructure, you ensure that your brand stays out of the "Junk" folder and remains where it belongs: in front of your customers.
Want to dive deeper?
Check out our Support Portal for guides on setting up your Verified Domain or visit our Developer Documentation for technical specifications on our API and data model.