Email Deliverability: IP Warm-Up, Sending Rate, and Reputation Management

Email Deliverability: IP Warm-Up, Sending Rate, and Reputation Management

Sending an email is not the same as delivering it to the inbox. Deliverability is a discipline of its own.

Core factors affecting deliverability

1. Sender reputation: historical standing of the sending IP and domain
2. Authentication records: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC correctly configured
3. Content quality: spam trigger words, image-to-text ratio
4. User engagement: open rate, click rate, unsubscribe rate, complaint rate

IP warm-up

A new IP sending large volumes immediately looks like a spam source. Ramp up gradually:

Days	Daily volume
Days 1–3	200
Days 4–7	500
Week 2	2,000
Week 3	5,000
Week 4	10,000

During warm-up, send only to your most engaged users — those who opened something in the last 30 days.

Target metrics

• Open rate > 20% (below this suggests subject line problems or poor list quality)
• Click rate > 2%
• Unsubscribe rate < 0.5%
• Complaint rate < 0.1% (Gmail uses this threshold to throttle your mail)

Monitoring delivery with Rovela

Rovela webhooks deliver real-time status updates for every email. Combined with a simple monitoring query, you can catch reputation problems early:

// Daily delivery rate
SELECT
  DATE(sent_at) as date,
  COUNT(*) FILTER (WHERE status = 'delivered') * 100.0 / COUNT(*) as delivery_rate
FROM email_log
GROUP BY DATE(sent_at)
ORDER BY date DESC;

Separate transactional and marketing mail

This is the most important rule: use different sending IPs and domains for transactional email (verification codes, password resets, order confirmations) and marketing email. A reputation hit on marketing mail won't take down your transactional deliverability.