Glossary
What is inbox placement?
Inbox placement is where a delivered email actually lands: the main inbox, a tab such as Promotions, or the spam folder. It is not the same as delivery rate, which only says the receiving server accepted the message. An email can be delivered and still never be seen because it went to spam.
Published by Sellinger AI. Numbers and settings checked on 24 October 2026 against the fact register. Report an error.
How is it different from delivery rate?
| Measure | What it tells you | What it misses |
|---|---|---|
| Delivery rate | The receiving server accepted the message | Whether it reached the inbox |
| Inbox placement | Whether it reached the inbox, a tab or spam | Whether anyone read it |
| Reply rate | Whether a person answered | Nothing important for cold email |
How do you test it?
The simple way: send the same message to a handful of real mailboxes you control on different providers, such as Gmail, Outlook and a company mailbox, and check where it lands. Paid placement tools use larger seed lists. Neither is perfect, because providers personalise placement per recipient, but a sudden move to spam across your seeds is a clear warning.
What moves placement?
- Authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC that pass and align.
- Reputation: your history of complaints, bounces and replies.
- Content: links, images and phrases that look like bulk mail.
- Pattern: sudden volume, identical text to many people, sending at odd hours.
- Engagement: recipients who reply or move you out of spam help the next message.
How Sellinger handles it
Sellinger does not run inbox placement tests. The agent writes a different message for each person, and every connected account has daily limits that the agent cannot exceed, set per account. LinkedIn defaults are 20 invitations a day and 150 a week. Email defaults to 50 sends a day per mailbox, with an optional warm up that starts at 5 a day and doubles every 3 days up to the limit.
Sending follows a schedule you set (days, hours and time zone). When no schedule is set, a quiet window of 01:00 to 08:00 local time applies. Measure the result that matters, replies from people, in the analytics.
Common questions
Is Promotions as bad as spam?
Can I trust open rates to measure placement?
Does Sellinger guarantee inbox placement?
Sources and method
General mailbox provider practice. Sellinger behaviour from the fact register, checked 24 October 2026.
Related: Email deliverability, Email open rate, Sender reputation, DMARC.
