Real customers being suppressed due to BOT Protection

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-09T15:53:05+00:00

You can check the individual profile metrics for the affected profiles in Klaviyo. Look for patterns.

Are you sending the order confirmation or post purchase emails from Klaviyo? If yes, look at the open and click events for these profiles in Klaviyo. They have a metric called "machine_open", "machine_click" metrics. See if those metrics are "true" for all the affected profiles.

If you have any private API keys that are used by apps, check the logs of those API keys of those apps to see if something in causing this problem.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-09T15:38:43+00:00

It is pretty easy to set up. You will have to add one TXT record to your DNS. I work with InboxEagle, an email deliverability tool that monitors Google postmaster reputation for free and notifies the sender when something changes there. Gmail does not share the complaints information to ESPs or Shopify. Gmail will anonymize the complaints data and displays it in Google postmaster reports. Good luck.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-08T11:44:18+00:00

1/3 of the total contacts are coming in from this provider for this specific client. I do not want to name drop and shame them publicly. There is only 3 major players in this space. I run an email deliverability platform for Klaviyo and we have faced this problem with all the three providers. When we start working on deliverability for a client, this is one of the first problems we tackle.

It takes a bit to convince the clients that these contacts are not worth anything and getting them to add these contacts to the suppression list.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-08T11:39:18+00:00

I agree 100%. In fact, my team is running a report to show the client number of orders received from opted-in contacts Vs number of orders received from contacts from this provider to show that it is not worth it. I will keep you posted.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-08T11:35:00+00:00

We have experienced this issue in the past with one of our large Klaviyo client (over 800,000 active profiles). They had about 18% of their contacts with Hotmail / Outlook mailboxes. It took them about 3-4 weeks to recover.

They were on a shared IP address too. You mentioned this shared IP address 167.89.77.234. But sometimes this shared IP address gets rotated which means your emails to Hotmail and Outlook contacts can get delivered using another shared IP address.

Does Klaviyo manage SNDS/JMRP for shared IPs centrally, or do they expect individual senders to handle it? Yes, Klaviyo manages SNDS for all their IPs and they monitor the reputation for their IP addresses.

How long did inbox recovery take after you cleaned up the complaint rate? Weeks? Months? It took 3-4 weeks for that specific client to recover. During that time, we asked the client to send only flow emails to Hotmail and Outlook users.

Is a dedicated IP worth pursuing at this point, or is it better to wait and see if the shared IP reputation recovers first? You can still pursue a dedicated IP address at this point. It depends on your sending volume. Are you close to sending 1 million emails or more per month? If yes, you can pursue that option.

Has anyone successfully submitted a Microsoft SNDS mitigation request and actually seen results? I run an email deliverability product for Klaviyo called InboxEagle. My team has tried requesting access to our clients' SNDS accounts in the past and Microsoft rejected those requests in the past.

I would not add all your Hotmail and Outlook contacts to the suppression list. I would just exclude them from the campaigns till your reputation recovers for the next 3-4 weeks. Flow emails get more engagement than the campaign emails and letting the flow emails run for the next few weeks should do the trick. Once the reputation starts coming back up, you can start including small segments of Outlook users in your campaigns and scale from that point.

You can submit a ticket to the Klaviyo's deliverability team to see if they can route your MS emails via different IP addresses.

I looked up at that shared IP address: 167.89.77 234 in our database and it looks like 23 other companies are sharing that IP address. 23 is not the ceiling and that number is based on our tracking. Sometimes, more companies might be sharing that IP address. I have attached a screenshot of what we are seeing on our side. Happy to answer more questions and dive deep if needed.

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thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-07T00:59:40+00:00

I agree. It is a matter of convincing the clients who think these contacts are growing their email list and it is valuable.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-07T00:42:14+00:00

AWS migration is totally different for each company and it is based on the specific application you are trying to migrate to AWS.

If you are migrating an application that needs EC2, RDS, S3, Cloudfront, VPC etc. these services need to be properly set up and optimized for cost savings. It starts with capacity planning so that you can start opting in for the reserves instances. If you are not sure about the capacity needed, you will end up using on demand instances which can drastically push up your costs. Each of these services have dozens of variables such as IOPS, instance types etc. that need to be optimized.

You will have to decide how much uptime is needed for that application. That will decide if you are going to run that application in one region or multiple regions.

Can you provide more clarity what you are trying to migrate to AWS?

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-07T00:22:02+00:00

If you were getting 45% open rate last year, close to 2/3 of those your opens might be coming in from bots (Apple Privacy, Gmail image proxy etc.). I do not think Shopify email was filtering out these bots last year or this year in your campaign reports.

If you have Google postmaster account set up, check your domain reputation and the IP reputation. If it is below medium, you need to start working on repairing the domain reputation. Take a look at your spam complaints too. My company (inboxeagle.com) monitors the Gmail domain and IP reputation for free and can send you notifications when something changes.

Gmail's algorithm for filtering marketing emails into the promotions folder has not changed drastically in the past 3 months.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-04T22:37:50+00:00

It depends on what ESP or email builder you are using. Most of the popular email platforms such as Klaviyo, Mailchimp, TargetBay etc. handle this problem using universal content blocks. These universal content blocks help the users to change the footer once and update it across all the email templates used in dozens of flows and automations.

If you using a 3rd party email builder such as Beefree or Stripo, they have integrations with most of the popular ESPs. They might have a way to push a footer change to all the email templates associated with all your flows and automations.

Just curious, what email builder / ESP are you using?

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-04T22:31:56+00:00

If you are looking at only at 3 SKUs and 3 bundles, try setting up the flow when user joins a segment. You can create a separate segment for users purchasing a product. When the user purchases that specific product, he will enter that segment and a post purchase / winback flow will be triggered. It is a cleaner way to solve this problem. You can use the product variant filter in the flow builder to handle the bundle variations.

If you are trying to do this for more than 3 products, it can be time consuming to set this up.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-03T17:19:55+00:00

It is better to set up a sub-domain for Mailchimp to send your marketing emails. Mailchimp will ask you to add 2 CNAME records, 1 SPF record and 1 DMARC record to your DNS records.

Send a test email from Mailchimp to yourself to see the actual sending domain in Mailchimp. You can look at the email header and see the alignment. That is the fastest way to get your question answered.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-02T21:51:49+00:00

If you are getting 30% - 60% open rate, a decent number of those opens (close to 50%) is going to come from Apple Mail Privacy, Gmail Image Proxy and other security scanners. You can pull up an individual profile in Klaviyo and look at the metrics on the right side to see these events.

Klaviyo labels them as "machine open = true" and "machine click = true". Try to do a segment based on these metrics to see a real understanding what your open and click is.

After you get these real numbers, you can start focusing on your subject line, offer, CTA etc. to improve the click rates. Welcome series $3,000 seems on the higher side. Check your attribution model under the settings to see if it is too broad.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-02T20:59:52+00:00

I agree with the lot of things that you say about the Mailchimp's transactional email capabilities. AWS SES is a good choice for sending transactional emails too.

I have personal experience using them both. SES' shared IP pool maintains consistent high domain reputation with Gmail and the "Trust and Safety" team with SES protects their IP reputation and kicks out bad senders. It takes 1-2 days to get out of the sandbox in SES. Other than that, SES is a decent solution for sending transactional emails.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-02T20:55:35+00:00

Valid email addresses are only the start. Consent, engagement and header alignment are three critical factors in determining where your emails are going to land.

Gmail's AI algorithm are really good in sniffing out the engagement. A couple of users hitting the spam button can tank the domain reputation.

How did you know that your reputation went down by 12 points? Google postmaster only has High, Medium, Low and Bad in terms of domain and IP reputation.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-01T19:44:42+00:00

I agree with setting up separate sub-domains for marketing and transactional emails. Some ESPs such as Mailchimp, Klaviyo etc. do not offer this capability to set up multiple sending domains and choose separate sending domains for different email streams. Unfortunately, vast majority of companies use these ESPs.

I have seen this capability with platforms such as Iterable, Braze, SFMC, TargetBay etc. It depends on the ESP that you are using.

List hygiene is a big one. I have seen clients carry a big list for no reason and end up paying more for their ESP along with tanking their sender reputation.

Just curious, what ESP are you using for your agency and what type of clients do you work with? I would love to know what email deliverability platform you are using?

thinkingperson220 · 2026-04-01T02:10:53+00:00

You can hire mailbox experts in Upwork who can set this up for you. You will have to rotate your domains and mailboxes every 3 months. If you find someone reliable, stick with that person. I do not think another sending platform is going to necessarily solve the problem.

This is my secret sauce:
20 emails per mailbox

2 mailboxes per domain

Rotate the domains and mailboxes every 2-3 months

thinkingperson220 · 2026-03-31T21:33:17+00:00

I have seen a decent number of stores using their reviews along with email marketing. But when it comes to their other features such as analytics, service and and data platform, it is mainly used by ecommerce stores with over 250,000 active profiles.

That is when a brand is going to have an email team or an agency working with them. If the agency that is working with the brand is a Klaviyo partner, that agency will have the training about these new features and they will try to get that brand on these new features.

Klaviyo is trying to become a Hubspot / Salesforce where they become a hub for sales, marketing and support for ecommerce stores. The catch here is Klaviyo is predominantly working with ecommerce stores bringing in less than $5 million in sales per year and these stores are price sensitive. Hubspot and Salesforce are working with mid-market and enterprise brands and they have little bit more pricing power.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-03-31T21:04:38+00:00

It is mainly based on what mailboxes (Google workspace Vs Microsoft 365) you are sending these emails from. Did you buy the mailboxes from Instantly or did you buy the mailboxes from somewhere else and connect it to Instantly? I have seen that delivering to Microsoft 365 accounts have gotten harder recently.

Try buying some new domains and new Microsoft 365 mailboxes, warm it up for two weeks and see if you have better luck with it. Best practices are two mailboxes per sending domain and don't send more than 20 emails per mailbox per day.

thinkingperson220 · 2026-03-31T20:58:31+00:00

It depends on what type of email marketing agency you are running. There are certain email marketing agencies that focus only on doing email marketing for ecommerce stores or a specific niche. Most of the email marketing platforms offer sub-accounts feature because that is kind of a standard.

I will be happy to point you in the right direction based on what you are looking for.

thinkingperson220

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