Verify before you send: protecting your sender reputation

Your sender reputation is the quiet asset behind every campaign. Damage it, and even your best-written emails land in spam. The good news: most of the damage is preventable with a few checks before you hit send. Here's what Dexisphere agents check, and how to read the results.

Why bounces cost more than you think

Mailbox providers watch how people respond to your mail. A high bounce rate is one of the clearest signals that a sender is careless or worse. Send to enough dead addresses and providers start filtering your mail, including the messages going to real, interested people.

Scraped and purchased lists are the usual culprits, but even a list you built carefully decays. People change jobs, businesses close, domains lapse. A list that was clean in spring won't be clean in autumn.

Check the addresses

Address verification isn't built into the send itself, so a good agent runs it first. Ask for it explicitly, or put it in the agent's instructions so it happens every time:

Before any email campaign, run verify_emails on every recipient.
Remove invalid addresses. List the unknown ones separately and
ask me whether to include them.

verify_emails returns a status for each address. Here's how we read them:

Check your sending domain

Clean recipients aren't enough if your own domain looks suspicious. check_sending_domain looks at how your domain is set up for sending, so you can catch missing or broken authentication records before they cost you a campaign. If it flags something, fix it with whoever manages your DNS before you send at volume.

list_mail_accounts is a useful companion: it confirms which mailbox the agent will actually send from, so you don't warm up one domain and send from another.

Check the copy

Spam filters read your words too. check_email_copy reviews a draft for phrasing, formatting and link patterns that tend to cause trouble. Treat its notes like an editor's: most are worth taking, some you'll overrule for good reasons.

“Deliverability isn't one big fix. It's three small checks, every single time.”

— Sam Whitfield, Growth Lead

Make it a habit

Checks only help if they happen. With Ask before sending switched on, the agent shows you its checks alongside the draft and recipients before anything goes out, so a skipped verification is obvious. A simple routine we recommend:

1. Verify every list before its first campaign, and again if it's more than a couple of months old.
2. Check the sending domain whenever you add a new mail account.
3. Run the copy check on every new draft.
4. After sending, ask for campaign_performance and watch bounces and unsubscribes.

The deliverability category in the idea library has ready-made tasks for all of this.