Deliverability

Deliverability is the question behind every email API: not just whether a message was accepted for sending, but whether it actually reaches the inbox rather than the spam folder or a silent block. Sending is the easy part. Earning the trust of the mailbox providers that decide where your mail lands is the work — and most of that trust is built before you ever send a message.

This page explains the forces that shape inbox placement and where Samva fits into each one. It is background, not a checklist. When you're ready to act on it, start with verifying your sending domain, which is the single highest-leverage step.

Why inbox placement is hard

When you hand a message to Samva, it is relayed through AWS SES to the recipient's mailbox provider — Gmail, Outlook, and the rest. Each provider runs its own filtering, and none of them publish exactly how it works. Broadly, they weigh three things:

• Identity — can the provider prove the mail genuinely came from the domain it claims to be from?
• Reputation — does mail from this sender historically get delivered, opened, and left in the inbox, or does it bounce and get marked as spam?
• Engagement — do recipients actually want this mail, measured by opens, clicks, replies, and the absence of complaints?

You can't control a provider's filter directly. What you can control is the signal you send it. Samva's role is to make the strong signals easy to establish and the damaging signals automatic to suppress.

Identity: verified domains and authentication

The foundation of deliverability is proving that your mail is yours. A mailbox provider that can't authenticate a message has little reason to trust it, and increasingly will reject or quarantine it outright. Samva lets new accounts send a first test email right away, but production traffic should come from a verified sending domain. An unverified customer domain has no established identity, so sends from that domain are rejected.

Verification works by publishing DNS records that mailbox providers check at delivery time. Each record answers a different question:

• DKIM attaches a cryptographic signature to every message, published as CNAME records on your domain. The receiving provider verifies the signature against your DNS, confirming the message was authorized by your domain and wasn't altered in transit. Samva signs your outgoing mail with DKIM once the domain is verified.
• SPF, published as a TXT record, declares which servers are allowed to send on behalf of your domain. It lets a provider confirm the mail came from a sanctioned source rather than a spoofer.
• DMARC, also a TXT record, ties DKIM and SPF together into a policy: it tells providers what to do with mail that fails authentication, and gives you reporting on attempts to send as your domain. It's recommended rather than strictly required, but it's where casual authentication becomes a deliberate posture.

There's one more piece. By default, mail can appear to recipients as sent "via amazonses.com," which weakens the sense that the mail is really yours. Verification includes a MAIL FROM domain — an MX record and a TXT record on a subdomain you control — so your mail sends from your own domain and aligns cleanly with your DKIM and SPF identity.

The takeaway is that authentication isn't a formality you complete once and forget. It is the mechanism by which every message you send carries a verifiable claim of origin. Without it, reputation has nothing to attach to.

Reputation: bounces, complaints, and suppression

Once your identity is established, mailbox providers track how your mail behaves over time. Two signals damage reputation faster than anything else, and Samva is built to keep both of them from compounding.

Bounces happen when a message can't be delivered — most importantly, hard bounces to addresses that don't exist. A sender that keeps emailing dead addresses looks careless or like a list buyer, and providers respond by throttling or filtering the sender. Complaints happen when a recipient marks your mail as spam; a complaint is the strongest possible signal that mail is unwanted, and a rising complaint rate is the quickest route to the spam folder.

Samva handles both automatically. Delivery events flow back from SES — bounces, complaints, and successful deliveries are all captured — and addresses that hard-bounce or complain are added to a suppression list. Once an address is suppressed, Samva won't send to it again, so a single bad address can't keep accumulating bounces against your reputation. Bounce handling and suppression are managed for you, so you don't have to track dead or complaining addresses yourself.

Underneath this, each organization sends through its own isolated reputation context in SES, so the sending behavior of one tenant doesn't drag down another. Your reputation is yours to build, and it's insulated from everyone else's.

The practical consequence: keep your lists clean and let suppression do its job. Trying to route around a suppressed address — or repeatedly sending to addresses that bounce — works against the very reputation that gets the rest of your mail delivered.

Engagement: tracking opens and clicks

Beyond authentication and reputation, mailbox providers increasingly read engagement as a signal of wanted mail. Messages that recipients open, click, and reply to reinforce that your mail belongs in the inbox; messages that are ignored or deleted unread erode that standing over time.

Samva can record opens (when a recipient opens a message) and clicks (when a recipient clicks a link), and surfaces them alongside delivery status in your dashboard activity log. Engagement tracking is primarily there to give you visibility: it tells you which messages are landing and resonating, and which sends or segments are quietly failing. That feedback is what lets you stop sending mail nobody wants before it costs you reputation.

It's worth being precise about what tracking is and isn't. Open and click data are useful but imperfect — opens depend on a recipient loading remote content, and some providers pre-fetch or block tracking pixels, so the numbers are directional rather than exact. Treat engagement as a trend to watch, not a guarantee, and use it to inform what and how often you send.

How the pieces fit together

These three forces aren't independent steps — they reinforce each other in order:

1. Authentication gives your mail a verifiable identity, so reputation has something durable to attach to.
2. Reputation, protected by automatic bounce and complaint suppression, determines whether providers keep delivering your mail.
3. Engagement signals from real recipients confirm the mail is wanted and sustain reputation over the long run.

Samva carries the parts that are mechanical: domain authentication during verification, suppression of bounced and complained addresses, and visibility into delivery and engagement. What remains yours is the judgment — sending relevant mail to people who asked for it, at a cadence they welcome. No API can manufacture that, but with the foundations handled, it's the part worth your attention.

Next steps