Qualified’s email deliverability guide

Qualified helps your AI SDR agent’s and reps’ emails reach your leads’ inboxes reliably and compliantly. This guide explains how Qualified protects your sender reputation, how email infrastructure is set up, and what you can do to maintain strong deliverability.

Deliverability protection

Protecting your email deliverability is critical to making sure your AI SDR agent’s and reps’ messages consistently reach your prospects’ inboxes and drive engagement. If you're connecting Qualified to your own Gmail or Outlook inbox, safeguarding your email deliverability is especially important. 

Qualified takes a proactive approach to help protect your domain’s sender reputation and support the long-term success of your campaigns.

1. Bounce rate management

Bounce performance is monitored across all sends. If an email address returns a hard bounce or three soft bounces, it will be automatically suppressed from future campaigns to avoid damage to your sending reputation.

2. Volume controls

Large, sudden spikes in email volume can flag your messages as suspicious. To prevent this, Qualified staggers email sends to maintain consistent volume. When new sender identities or IPs are introduced, we use a domain warm-up process to gradually establish trust with inbox providers.

3. Spam complaint prevention

While complaints are ultimately up to the recipient, we reduce the likelihood of them by:

• Including unsubscribe links in all outbound emails
• Automatically honoring opt-out requests
• Using clear sender identities and relevant, purpose-driven messaging

4. Rate limiting

To reduce the risk of being temporarily blocked by large email providers (like Gmail or Outlook), Qualified applies rate limiting to high-volume sends. This ensures that emails are delivered gradually to the same domain, helping preserve trust with mailbox providers.

5. Email content quality

Qualified applies email formatting best practices to reduce the likelihood of messages being flagged as spam. This includes:

• Generating plain-text emails
• Maintaining a low text-to-image ratio
• Promoting personalized, relevant messaging to boost engagement

Sender options

Qualified supports two types of senders, each with its own configuration approach.

AI SDR agent

Your AI SDR agent can send email in two ways:

• Qualified Mailbox: Qualified manages the sender identity and email infrastructure via Amazon SES. No inbox setup is needed on your end. Qualified Mailbox protects domain reputation and supports high-volume sending.
• Gmail or Outlook integration: You can connect your agent to an existing Gmail or Outlook account using OAuth. Emails are sent from your own mail server.

Most customers use Qualified Mailbox for simplicity and deliverability safeguards.

Your agent sends through one connection at a time. If you switch from Gmail or Outlook to Qualified Mailbox, leads already in progress finish on the existing connection, and new leads use Qualified Mailbox.

Sales reps

Sales reps must connect their individual email accounts using Gmail or Outlook via OAuth. Rep messages are always sent through their own inboxes and cannot be routed through Qualified Mailbox.

Qualified Mailbox setup

Subdomain requirement

Customers using Qualified Mailbox must configure a dedicated subdomain for email sending (e.g., try.yourcompany.com). This subdomain:

• Must be authenticated with the DNS records Qualified generates for it: three DKIM CNAME records, a custom MAIL FROM MX record and SPF TXT record, and an inbound MX record for replies
• Shouldn’t already receive mail elsewhere, because an existing MX record on the subdomain splits replies between that destination and Qualified
• Must be managed by your IT team
• Should ideally come from your primary domain to benefit from its established reputation

This setup is required to support email reply handling and sender reputation management. For what each record does, see the DNS records section of Setting up Qualified Mailbox.

Sender email

You’ll select your agent’s sender email address (e.g., piper@try.yourcompany.com) during the setup process in Qualified. Qualified will provision and manage this email identity on your behalf. You do not need to create this mailbox within your internal systems.

Dedicated IPs and warm-up process

By default, emails sent through Qualified Mailbox are delivered from a shared IP pool. This pool is monitored and protected to maintain deliverability across all accounts.

For organizations with larger volumes, we offer dedicated IPs. To qualify, you must send at least 50,000 emails per month and follow a consistent sending cadence. This consistency is important for building and maintaining a healthy IP reputation. Please reach out to your Qualified Success Architect for more information if your organization prefers to use a dedicated IP for your Qualified Email program.

Qualified uses domain warming to gradually introduce your domain to inbox providers. This prevents email delivery issues caused by sudden volume increases and helps build a trustworthy sender profile over time. Qualified maintains a Trusted IP shared pool for customers.

Email address validation and safeguards

Qualified automatically validates email addresses before enrollment and monitors ongoing send behavior to protect deliverability.

When validation happens

• Before Enrollment: Invalid addresses are suppressed and not added to campaigns.
• After Sending: Any address that hard bounces once or soft bounces three times is suppressed.
• After Successful Delivery: If no bounces occur after one week, the address may be temporarily approved for future sends.

How validation works

Each email address is checked using the following methods:

• Internal allow/blocklist
• Syntax and formatting checks
• Real-time validation via Amazon SES, which classifies addresses as Valid, Risky, or Invalid based on factors like:
  • Known bounce behavior
  • Role-based or disposable addresses
    Domain validity and DNS status

Validation duration

Email addresses remain in a suppressed or approved state for the following timeframes:

• Invalid syntax: Indefinite
• Known bounce: 180 days
• Suspected disposable or role address: 60 days
• Invalid domain: 30 days
• Successful delivery: 180 days

Shared suppression system

To protect all customers and maintain a high deliverability standard, Qualified manages a global suppression list. If an address is identified as invalid (e.g., due to a hard bounce or known risk), it is blocked from sending across all Qualified accounts. This shared approach prevents repeated issues and protects the integrity of the shared IP pool.

Unsubscribes and compliance

Every email sent via Qualified includes an unsubscribe link. When a recipient opts out:

• They are automatically excluded from future campaigns
• Their status is visible in the Campaign Analytics tab
• Qualified helps you comply with applicable email regulations, including CAN-SPAM

Tracking performance

You can monitor email engagement and deliverability in the Campaign Analytics tab, including:

• Open and click rates
• Bounce rates
• Unsubscribes
• Meeting conversions

These insights help you optimize campaign performance and ensure successful follow-up.