Hi everyone. I'm from the Glasa io team.
Two of our domains were set up the same week, same way, same person doing it. One landed fine. The other one just quietly didn't. Took us about six weeks to figure out why and the answer wasn't on any checklist I've read.
Our SPF record had crept past 10 DNS lookups. Every tool we'd bolted on over the years added an include and nobody was counting. Past 10 it returns permerror and most receivers treat that as a fail. Nothing warns you. No dashboard turns red. We only found it buried in DMARC aggregate reports, which I'll admit we'd been ignoring for months.
Flattened it down to 6. Seed test placement went 61% to 89% over the next nine days. We changed nothing else in that window.
While we were in there, something else worth knowing. Everyone tells you to watch domain reputation in Google Postmaster Tools. At 12 to 15 emails per inbox you will never see a number in there. Google doesn't report below roughly 100 a day to the same recipient domain and you're not close. So the advice everyone repeats points you at a dashboard that structurally can't show you anything at cold volume. We lost three weeks refreshing an empty page.
What does work at our scale is DMARC aggregate reports for auth failures and seed tests for placement. That's it. That's your whole instrumentation.
The other thing that changed how I think about lists. Google's complaint threshold is 0.3%. Run the maths at 15 a day across 3 inboxes and you're at roughly 990 a month per domain. Three complaints and you're over. Three people. So when someone says list quality matters, this is the actual number behind it, not a vibe.
Catch-alls, since people always ask. We ran 2,400 that came back risky. 31% bounced, which is bad but expected. The part that annoyed me more was the Microsoft-hosted ones accepting the message and then binning it silently. Counted as delivered. Never seen. Roughly 18% of that segment was a ghost and our reply rate looked broken because of it.
We also found two older domains still on 1024-bit DKIM keys from whatever the default was back then. Rotated to 2048. On its own probably nothing, but it was part of the same cleanup.
None of this is in the warm-up guides. All three together moved placement more than any copy change we made in the same period, which was slightly humbling given how much time we spend on copy.
Go count your SPF lookups. Takes two minutes and it's wrong more often than you'd think.
Source: r/GlasaIo · by /u/TeamGlasaio