Inbox placement

Delivery is measured at the SMTP conversation: the receiving server said yes. Everything interesting happens afterwards, inside the receiver, and nothing about it is reported back to you. A message quietly filed in spam produces exactly the same delivery record as one placed at the top of the inbox.

Which is why a dashboard reporting delivery as deliverability is answering a different question from the one the number is being used to answer.

The only honest method is to send to mailboxes you can read and look at where the message landed. That is what a seed list is: a set of addresses across the providers your recipients use, checked after each test.

Everything else is inference. Reply and open rates hint at placement, and a sharp fall in either is a genuine warning sign, but neither tells you which folder anything is in — and open rates in particular are polluted by image proxies firing pixels for mail no human read.

An inbox-placement percentage across an entire campaign cannot be measured from the sending side. Reporting one requires either access to every recipient's mailbox or a model dressed up as a measurement.

The defensible version is narrow: for the addresses we could observe, here is where the message landed and here is when we looked. Less impressive, and actually true.

SalesShift reports folder placement only for seed addresses that are mailboxes your workspace has connected — the only case where the destination folder can be read. For any other seed it reports that the message was sent and that the folder is not measurable, rather than inventing an inbox percentage.