Key concepts

These are the core terms you’ll encounter throughout InboxEagle. Understanding them will help you read your dashboard data with confidence and take the right action when something looks off.

Deliverability

Deliverability is the measure of whether your emails reach the inbox (or promotions tab) instead of spam. InboxEagle surfaces metrics such as:

• Inbox rate — Share of messages landing in the primary inbox.
• Promotions rate — Share landing in the promotions tab (e.g. Gmail).
• Spam rate — Share landing in spam or being blocked.

Deliverability is shaped by domain authentication, sender reputation, and content. InboxEagle shows you where you stand per sending domain and IP — so you know what’s working and what to fix.

Tip

The promotions tab is not spam. For commercial senders, Gmail promotions placement is a deliverability success — your mail reached the inbox folder group and subscribers can find it.

Sending domain

A sending domain is the domain in your email’s “From” address (e.g. mail.example.com). InboxEagle shows per–sending-domain data such as:

• Authentication status (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).
• Inbox, promotions, and spam placement.
• Volume and trends over time.

A properly authenticated sending domain protects your reputation and improves inbox placement rates.

Note

Your sending domain is often a subdomain of your main domain (e.g. mail.example.com, not example.com). Authentication records must be set on the sending domain, not the root domain, unless you send from the root directly.

Inbox placement

Inbox placement is the outcome for a given message: inbox, promotions, or spam. InboxEagle breaks down placement by provider (Gmail, Yahoo, AOL) and over time, so you can spot issues and measure the impact of authentication changes, IP switches, or campaign adjustments.

Tip

Use the time-range filter to compare placement before and after a change. Placement changes rarely happen instantly — look for trends over days, not hours.

Google Postmaster Tools

Google Postmaster Tools is Google’s free service for bulk senders. When you connect it to InboxEagle, you can see:

• Domain and IP reputation scores.
• Traffic and encryption stats.
• User-reported spam ratio and delivery errors.

You connect it directly from the InboxEagle app; your Postmaster data then appears in the deliverability dashboard and related views.

Bot Finder and engagement quality

When using Bot Finder with Amazon SES, engagement events (opens and clicks) come from two sources:

• Real subscribers — Actual human opens and clicks.
• Bots and scanners — Privacy proxies (e.g. Apple AMPP, Gmail image proxy), corporate security scanners, and other automated traffic.

Bot Finder classifies each event so you can filter out bot activity and base decisions on true engagement. See Integrations: Bot Finder for setup details.

Caution

Bot-inflated engagement is a hidden risk. Without filtering, open rates of 40–60% on SES are common — but the real human rate may be half that. Making suppression, re-engagement, or content decisions on inflated data degrades list quality and, over time, hurts deliverability.