Protect your sender reputation

Authentication decides whether receivers trust your mail at all (Set up a sending domain); the tools below show how authenticated mail is received. Each needs something outside the platform, and the console says what is missing rather than showing an empty panel.

Google Postmaster Tools

Google reports a domain's reputation (high, medium, low, bad) and its user-reported spam rate to the domain's owner. The platform pulls yesterday's numbers every morning for each verified domain, once the domain is verified in Postmaster Tools and the platform's service account can read it there; the domain page's Postmaster panel says which is missing.

Google shows data only for domains that send a few hundred messages a day to Gmail users. Below that, each day is recorded without data and the panel says the domain is below Google's volume: the normal state for a small project, not a problem with the domain.

GET /v1/domains/{id}/reputation answers:

{
  "object": "reputation",
  "postmaster": { "configured": true, "has_data": true },
  "seed": { "configured": true, "inboxes": 3, "pending": false },
  "snapshots": [
    {
      "id": "019a…",
      "domain_id": "019a…",
      "source": "postmaster",
      "captured_at": "2026-10-26T00:00:00.000Z",
      "data": { "has_data": true, "day": "20261026", "domain_reputation": "high", "spam_rate": 0.0004 }
    }
  ],
  "seed_tests": []
}

The latest values are also on the domain object as reputation. Keep the spam rate as close to zero as you can: Gmail and Yahoo filter bulk senders whose rate stays high.

Seed tests

A seed test sends a plain message from the domain to a few test mailboxes and reads, over IMAP, where it landed: inbox, spam, promotions (Gmail's tab) or missing. It runs once a week for every verified domain, and on request:

curl -X POST https://api.minket.com/v1/domains/019a2b3c-4d5e-7f60-8a9b-0c1d2e3f4a5b/seedtest \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $MINKET_API_KEY"

The answer (202) lists the previous results; placement for the new run is read within the hour. Seed messages are not your emails: they appear in no list and raise no events or webhooks. A handful of inboxes is a sample, not a placement rate, so use seed tests to catch a domain going to spam everywhere, not to measure small changes.

When sending pauses

Bounce and complaint rates per stream are on the console's overview. When a project's rates climb, alerts open in the console first; if they keep climbing, the project's kill switch pauses its live sending. The thresholds are in the console, beside the alerts they open. A spike in volume opens an alert too, but never pauses sending.

While the kill switch is on:

• live sends answer 503 sending_paused, which is retryable;
• mail already queued is held: it stays queued and nothing fails;
• broadcasts pause where they stopped, and forwards of received mail wait;
• test mode keeps working.

An owner or admin clears the switch in the console (Settings, Projects) once the cause is fixed; the console shows why it tripped. Held mail goes out within minutes, and a paused broadcast resumes when it is sent again (cancel it first if it should not). Mail held past the 30 days its content is kept fails when it is released. Owners and admins can also pause a project's sending by hand there.

DMARC pass rates come from the aggregate reports receivers send (DMARC reports).

Updated 29 October 2026