Proof · Deliverability repair · 7 weeks
The dashboard said 99% delivered. Gmail said otherwise.
By Theo Ramaker, Lifecycle Automation Lead · Published June 2, 2026 · Updated July 26, 2026 · Client anonymized; figures representative of the engagement
A fitness membership app with a 78,000-profile list noticed renewals from email sliding for two quarters while their ESP reported 99% delivery. Both things were true. "Delivered" means a mailbox provider accepted the message; the spam folder counts. Our baseline GlockApps seed test measured what the dashboard could not: 78% of their mail reached the Gmail inbox. The rest was delivered, technically, to a folder nobody opens.
The problem: reputation debt, paid in silence
The diagnosis took one week and found four compounding causes. DKIM was signing with the ESP's shared domain rather than the brand's own, so DMARC never aligned. There was no RFC 8058 one-click unsubscribe, so tired subscribers hit "report spam" instead: complaint rate 0.36%, above Google's 0.3% enforcement threshold. Years of expired-trial addresses had never been retired. And every campaign went to all 78k profiles, engagement be damned.
The approach: fix the plumbing, then earn back trust
Authentication came first: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC aligned on the sending domain, one-click unsubscribe headers live, both inside week two. The slower work was reputational. Weeks two through four, we suppressed 29% of the list under a sunset policy: expired trials, hard-bounce history, and profiles silent past the engagement threshold.
During recovery, sends went only to the engaged segments from the audience map, then widened step by step as Google Postmaster Tools showed domain reputation climbing. Weekly GlockApps seeds tracked placement across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo so every widening step had a number attached.
The result: the inbox, and everything downstream of it
| Metric | Baseline | Week 7 |
|---|---|---|
| Gmail inbox placement (seed tests) | 78% | 98% |
| Spam-complaint rate | 0.36% | 0.05% |
| Active list size | 78k | −29% suppressed |
| Cancel-save flow click rate | 3.4% | 6.1% (Klaviyo flow avg: 5.58%) |
The cancel-save number is the one the client cares about. That flow had been "underperforming" for a year; it turned out to be fine, it just was not reaching inboxes. Placement repair alone took its click rate past the 5.58% platform average for flows. Deliverability work is like that: it makes everything you already built start counting again.
Monitoring stays on permanently: monthly seeds, Postmaster checks, complaint alerts at 0.1%. The method is documented in our Deliverability Repair service, and the warning signs are covered in why emails go to spam.