What are sustainable inbox health habits?

Good inbox placement isn't something you fix once and forget. It's more like a garden. You can plant the right seeds (authentication, a clean list, solid content), but if you walk away and ignore it, things go sideways fast. The good news is that the upkeep is way less work than the recovery.

And Here's a realistic rhythm that keeps your sender reputation in good shape without taking over your life.

Every send

• Make sure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are passing. If something broke quietly, you want to catch it before a big campaign goes out.
• Check that you're sending to people who actually signed up. No purchased lists, no scraped addresses, no guesses.
• Keep your unsubscribe link visible and working. Every. Single. Send.

Every week

• Review your Gmail Postmaster Tools dashboard. Look for any movement in domain reputation (good, medium, low, bad). One week of "low" is a warning sign you don't want to ignore.
• Check your bounce rate. Hard bounces above 2% and complaint rates above 0.08% are ranges that start to hurt you. Act before mailbox providers do.
• Process any spam complaints that came in through your feedback loop. Same-day suppression is the goal. These contacts should never hear from you again.

Every month

• Pull your engagement segments. Who hasn't opened in 90 days? Separate them out. Either run a re-engagement campaign or start suppressing them. Sending to people who never engage quietly drags your reputation down. (This one is where most senders fall short, honestly.)
• Do a list hygiene pass. Remove hard bounces that have accumulated, check for role addresses (like info@ or noreply@) that you probably shouldn't be mailing, and flag addresses that look stale. If your list is older or sourced from multiple places, a proper validation run helps catch what manual cleanup misses.
• Run a seed test or inbox placement check. Pick a few mailbox providers and see where your mail is actually landing. Spam folder surprises are a lot easier to fix when you catch them early.
• Verify your authentication records are still intact. DNS changes happen, sometimes without your knowledge. A quick check that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are still resolving correctly takes two minutes and could save you weeks of reputation repair.

Every quarter

• Review your sending frequency. Are you sending more than your audience signed up for? Sending less than they expect? Either direction causes problems. Your send frequency should match your subscribers' expectations, not just your content calendar.
• Look at your engagement across segments. Which subject lines, send times, and content types are driving opens and clicks? The patterns you find here should feed back into your strategy.
• Check whether your ESP is flagging any reputation warnings, IP issues, or deliverability changes you should know about.

The honest truth is that most deliverability problems aren't mysterious. They're the result of skipping these steps for long enough that things start to break. Sticking to this rhythm isn't exciting, but it's what keeps your emails landing where they're supposed to.

So if If your list has gone a while without proper cleaning, it's worth doing a validation run before picking up a heavier send schedule. We clean lists at Review My Emails if you'd rather hand that off than do it manually ;)