A customer asked a great question:
“Our IT provider says that after an email leaves our system, they can’t see where it goes or if it lands in spam. Is that the same for Quinset, or can you tell if a message’s gone to spam?”
Short answer: no one can see the exact folder your recipient’s email lands in, but we can see the signals that got it there. And that’s the bit that actually matters.
What You Can and Can’t See
Once an email leaves your system, it travels through a series of receiving servers (Microsoft 365, Gmail, etc.) before landing in the user’s inbox, spam, or being rejected.
No sender, not even Google or Microsoft, gives a direct “spam vs inbox” confirmation for a specific message. That’s by design; it protects user privacy and prevents gaming the system. The closest we get is from tools like Google Postmaster showing us what percentage of recipients marked you as spam, or got rejecyed outright.
What is visible depends on your monitoring:
- Your IT provider can confirm the message left your system and reached the recipient’s mail server. After that, they lose visibility.
- Quinset’s deliverability tools go deeper. We can test across platforms to see how your domain and content perform in general. Think of it as checking your reputation with the post office, not opening someone else’s letterbox.
How We Detect Spam Placement Issues
We run controlled tests through multiple inbox providers to see if they treat your messages as trusted or suspicious.
From there, we can:
- Analyse message headers, the detailed routing and authentication info inside the email.
- Identify pattern-level problems such as Gmail junking similar messages.
- Trace authentication gaps like SPF, DKIM or DMARC misalignment.
- Flag content or formatting triggers that raise spam scores.
And if a recipient forwards a “live example” of a message that hit spam, that’s gold dust. We can pull its headers and inspect what really happened.
The Real Goal: Fixing the Why
Deliverability tools don’t just tell us where your email went; they show why it behaved that way.
Once we know that, we can start fixing the causes, such as:
- tightening domain alignment,
- cleaning up links,
- correcting content and HTML,
- improving engagement signals,
- or adjusting sending cadence.
Thee are the types of we things we work on to get reputation and inbox rates moving in the right direction.
Inbox Test: What You Can Try Today
Send your campaign to a few test inboxes across Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo.
If any land in spam, forward one back to us as an attachment. We’ll decode the headers and tell you what’s really going on.
Reality Check
You’ll never have a perfect window into every recipient’s inbox, but you can have clarity on your reputation. That’s where the real deliverability work happens.
Can We Help?
If you’re unsure how your domain’s being treated, book a 30 minute discovery call with Ben Fielding. He’ll show you where you stand and what’s worth fixing first.
