The Art of the Goodbye: How Automated Sunsetting Saved Our Deliverability

It sounds counter-intuitive, but sometimes the best way to grow your email list is to stop emailing people. We call it "The Art of the Goodbye," and it’s a core principle of our Engagement-Based Sending engine.

Why "Graymail" Kills Reputation

ISPs like Gmail are watching. If you keep sending emails to people who never open them (known as "graymail"), Gmail assumes your content is irrelevant. Eventually, they'll start punishing you by moving all your emails—even the ones to your fans—into the Spam folder.

Our Solution: Prioritized Queuing

We engineered a unique queuing system that prioritizes your engaged users. When you launch a broadcast, we don't send it to everyone in random order. We sort your list by our internal Engagement Score (0-100).

1. The Fan Club (Score 75+): We send to them first. They open and click quickly, generating a wave of positive signals to the ISPs. "Hey, people love this email!"
2. The Regulars (Score 50-74): We send to them next, riding the wave of positive reputation.
3. The Ghosts (Score < 25): We send to them last, and often slower. This "throttling" limits the damage if they mark you as spam.

The Sunset Policy

We also make it easy to implement a "Sunset Policy." If someone hasn't opened an email in 90 days, our system can automatically tag them as 'At Risk' and exclude them from daily blasts. It hurts to cut your list size, but I promise you: a small, engaged list is infinitely more valuable than a massive, dead one.