Managing your Sender Reputation

Overview

Your sender reputation is what mailbox providers (Gmail, Outlook, your recipients' corporate mail servers, and so on) use to decide whether your messages land in the inbox, get filtered to spam, or get blocked altogether. A strong reputation means better deliverability. A poor one means your communications quietly disappear before anyone reads them.

The good news is you don't need to be a deliverability expert to get this right. CX Platform handles the technical heavy lifting for you, applying global best practice to protect both your sending domain and the underlying CX Platform infrastructure. Authentication, throttling, bounce handling, and provider compliance are all taken care of automatically.

That leaves a few things in your hands — managing duplicates and unsubscribes — and this guide walks you through both.‍

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Most of this is taken care of for you.
‍During onboarding, our team works with yours to configure SPF, DKIM, and DMARC for your sending domain. From there, IP warming is managed for you on an ongoing basis, keeping your sending IPs in good standing with mailbox providers. The settings covered below are the few things worth knowing about.

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How CX Platform protects your reputation

Every message sent through CX Platform passes through a layer of safeguards designed to keep your domain trusted and your delivery rates high. Here's what's working in the background on every send:

Protection	What it does
Authentication	SPF, DKIM, and DMARC are configured and maintained for you, so mailbox providers can verify that messages genuinely come from your domain.
IP warming and throttling	Send volumes are paced and ramped automatically to keep sending IPs in good standing with major providers, even during large campaign bursts.
Bounce handling	Hard bounces are detected and suppressed automatically, so you're not repeatedly sending to invalid addresses, which damages reputation fast.
Provider compliance	CX Platform stays current with the requirements of Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and other major providers, so you don't have to track changing rules yourself.
Infrastructure monitoring	Sending IPs and domains are continuously monitored for blocklist activity, with issues investigated and resolved by the platform team.

The practical upshot: when you build a campaign in CX Platform and click send, the platform is already doing the work of a full deliverability team in the background.

Manage duplicates

Sending the same recipient the same message twice is one of the quickest ways to frustrate people, drive complaints, and chip away at your reputation. It's also surprisingly easy to do by accident — overlapping data files, retried jobs, or the same person appearing in two segments.

The Remove duplicates setting in the Duplicates and Unsubscribes card on the Details tab handles this for you. When ticked, CX Platform checks for duplicates within each send and suppresses them before delivery, so a recipient who shows up twice in your data only receives the message once. You don't need to clean your file beforehand or worry about it after the fact.

For most Applications, this should be on. The setting is disabled by default on new Applications, and we'd only recommend keeping it off in rare cases where the same recipient genuinely needs to receive the same message more than once in a single send.

Manage unsubscribes

Honouring unsubscribes quickly and reliably is one of the strongest signals you can send to mailbox providers that you're a legitimate sender. It's also a legal requirement in most regions. CX Platform gives you two settings to control how this works for each Application, both found in the Duplicates and Unsubscribes card on the Details tab of your Application.

Add automatic unsubscribe headers

The Add automatic unsubscribe headers setting is a simple checkbox in the Duplicates and Unsubscribes card. When ticked, every email sent from this Application includes a List-Unsubscribe header in line with current standards from Gmail, Yahoo, and other major providers. This adds a one-click unsubscribe option directly in the recipient's mail client, usually shown next to the sender name at the top of the email.

Why you'd want this turned on:

Better deliverability — major providers now require this header for bulk senders, and including it helps your messages reach the inbox.
Fewer spam complaints — when recipients can opt out easily, they're far less likely to mark your message as spam, which hurts reputation a lot more than an unsubscribe does.
No template work — you don't need to add anything to your email design. Just tick the box and the header is added on every send.

For most marketing and broadcast Applications, this should be on. The main reason to leave it off is for purely transactional communications where an unsubscribe option doesn't apply, like statements, security alerts, or service notifications.

Remove previous unsubscribes

The Remove previous unsubscribes setting can be found in your Application's Details tab and controls whether recipients who have previously unsubscribed should be filtered out of this Application's sends, and at what scope. It's a dropdown with four options.

Option	What it does
Don't remove	Previous unsubscribes aren't applied. Every recipient in your data file will be included, even if they've opted out of other communications. Use this only when you're confident the message should reach everyone, such as essential transactional sends.
From this application only	Recipients who have unsubscribed from this specific Application are filtered out. A good fit when each Application represents a distinct communication stream that recipients can opt in or out of independently.
From all applications in category	Recipients who have unsubscribed from any Application in the same Category are filtered out. Useful when Categories group related communications (for example, all marketing newsletters) and an opt-out from one should apply to all of them.
From all applications	Recipients who have unsubscribed from any Application across the platform are filtered out. The most cautious option, and the safest choice if you're unsure.

The right setting depends on how your communications are organised and what each Application is used for. If you're not sure, lean toward the broader scopes — over-suppressing is far better for your reputation than accidentally emailing someone who already opted out.

Quick recap

The technical side of sending reputation — authentication, throttling, bounce handling, and provider compliance — is all handled for you by CX Platform. Your job is the lighter-touch stuff: trust that duplicates won't go out twice, decide whether to add automatic unsubscribe headers, and choose the right scope for handling previous unsubscribes on each Application.

Get those settings right and your reputation will look after itself.