Find clear answers about sending, deliverability, and email campaigns.

Send to documented sandbox addresses such as delivered@messagebird.dev, bounce@messagebird.dev or complaint@messagebird.dev. These exercise outcomes and webhooks through the normal pipeline. Keep a rehearsal audience limited to sandbox addresses; real addresses in the same send receive real mail.

The onboarding domain supports a first send under its documented restrictions, and sandbox addresses support testing. Verify your own sending domain for regular sending. Check your workspace’s current limits rather than relying on a fixed plan allowance on this page.

Use the first-email quickstart for an API integration, the SMTP guide for an existing SMTP application, Email marketing for campaigns, or the agent-mailbox quickstart for conversations. Each path links to the matching setup and documentation.

You can start on the Free plan with its included sending allowance to test integration and delivery. Paid Email plans add a monthly deposit directly to your shared Bird balance, and each email you send is billed from that balance at your plan's published per-email rate without expiring message bundles. Visit the pricing page to compare current deposits, rates, and plan allowances.

If you downgrade your plan, any custom handles you have already claimed continue receiving mail without interruption, and you can claim additional handles once your usage is back within your plan's limit. Mailboxes created on your own verified domain count toward your total mailbox quota without using any of your custom-handle allowance.

Dedicated IPs are available as a monthly add-on on eligible paid Email plans. You can check the current monthly price per IP and the maximum number of dedicated IPs included in each plan tier on the Email pricing page before ordering from the dashboard.

Your sending throughput and monthly allowances depend on your Email plan, with full tier details listed on the Email pricing page and any custom enterprise limits applied automatically. You can check your active rate limits and remaining quota through the API or response headers, and use the returned wait time to pace retries when requests are throttled. API and SMTP traffic share your sending throughput, while batch requests and campaign broadcasts follow their own request limits.

A complete email can be up to 20 MB, including the HTML body, plain text, headers, and encoded attachments. Because attachment encoding adds overhead, keep raw attachment files under 15 MB so the assembled message stays within the limit, and keep in mind that some recipient mail servers enforce smaller size caps.

When content storage is enabled, you can inspect sent message bodies and attachments for up to 30 days. For Agent Mailboxes, parsed headers, extracted text, and attachments stay available for 30, 90, or 365 days depending on the retention tier selected on your plan, while raw MIME payloads are retained for 30 days.

Scope the agent's API key to the specific permissions its workflow requires, and configure mailbox receive rules so untrusted senders do not trigger agent runs. For sensitive outbound communication, have the agent save a draft first so a human or policy check can verify the recipients, sender address, and body before sending.

Yes, both go through the same send API. The only difference is the category field, which decides how suppressions and unsubscribes apply. Pick transactional for password resets and receipts, and marketing for campaigns.

Send an Idempotency-Key header with each logical send. If the first request succeeded but you never saw the response, replaying it with the same key gives you the original result back with an Idempotency-Replay header, rather than sending the email twice.

Set scheduled_at to any time between 30 seconds and 30 days ahead. The send comes back accepted straight away and stays scheduled until it goes out, so you can cancel it at any point before then.

Yes, as base64 in the attachments array. To show an image inline, give it a content_id and reference that from your HTML with cid:. Keep the raw files at or below 15 MB so the message still fits the 20 MB cap once it is encoded, and note that executable and script content types are refused before the send.

Yes. If your application or third-party software already sends email over SMTP, you can switch to Bird without rewriting code by updating the SMTP host, port, and credentials. Verify your sending domain in the dashboard and authenticate with an API key that has email sending permissions.

Connect on port 465 for implicit TLS encryption, or use ports 587 and 2525 with STARTTLS, including port 2525 for cloud environments that block standard mail ports. Point your client to the regional SMTP host that matches your API key; unencrypted submission on port 25 is disabled.

Use SMTP when you want a drop-in relay for existing services, CRMs, or frameworks that already assemble MIME messages. Choose the HTTP API when you want to send with stored templates, schedule deliveries, or pass structured JSON fields from your application code. Both methods share your verified domains, IP pools, suppression lists, and analytics.

SMTP messages are billed at the same published per-email rates as HTTP API sends under your Email plan, with no extra protocol fee. Check the Email pricing page for current plan rates, or talk with our team if you are migrating a high-volume SMTP workload.

Contacts live in your workspace and can store an email address, a phone number, your own external user ID, and custom attributes. Audiences reference those shared contact records, so when a customer updates their email address or profile details, the change carries across the audiences they belong to.

Upload a CSV, TSV, or Excel file in the dashboard, map your columns to contact attributes, and assign the imported contacts straight to an audience. To keep lists synchronized from your application, you can create or update up to 1,000 contacts per request through the API or CLI.

Audiences use explicit membership that you manage by adding or removing contacts through file imports, the dashboard, or the API. When a scheduled broadcast starts sending, Bird resolves the audience's current members so recent additions and removals take effect automatically.

You can define text, number, boolean, and date-time attributes with optional fallback values for missing data. Those attributes plug directly into your email templates so you can personalize subject lines and body copy for each recipient.

Select a saved audience when setting up your broadcast. When sending starts, Bird resolves the current audience members, filters out suppressed or unsubscribed addresses, and personalizes the template with each contact's saved attributes.

Yes. You can send a broadcast immediately or schedule it up to a year in advance, and you can edit or reschedule the campaign before delivery begins. If you cancel a broadcast that is scheduled or in progress, Bird stops delivery to any remaining recipients.

Broadcasts send a campaign to a saved audience up to a year ahead. For individual transactional emails, the sending API lets you schedule a message from 30 seconds to 30 days in advance. When you schedule a transactional send, Bird locks in the template version, language, and personalization values at request time so later edits do not alter your queued message.

Yes. Create a test audience populated with Bird sandbox addresses to simulate deliveries, bounces, and spam complaints without sending mail to real inboxes. Sandbox sends trigger your webhooks and appear in your analytics so you can verify your webhook and analytics integration before launching a live campaign, and they count toward your sending allowance.

Marketing broadcasts and transactional emails share your verified domains, templates, and delivery infrastructure, so you do not have to sync templates or suppression lists across two separate providers. Marketers can compose and schedule broadcasts in the dashboard, and developers can automate audience updates and campaign setup through the API, CLI, or MCP tools.

When you send a marketing broadcast or tag an API send as marketing, Bird includes one-click list-unsubscribe headers and an unsubscribe link for Gmail and Yahoo compliance. When a recipient opts out, Bird records their preference and filters them out of future marketing sends while still allowing transactional receipts and account alerts through.

Each broadcast report tracks delivered messages, human opens with automated privacy proxy prefetches filtered out, link clicks, bounces, and spam complaints. To tie campaigns back to signups or purchases, include UTM or custom link parameters and measure conversions in your product or analytics tool.

Use broadcasts in the dashboard to send newsletters, product announcements, and scheduled promotions to your saved audiences. For event-driven lifecycle emails such as welcome series, onboarding nudges, or cart reminders, trigger templates directly from your application backend using the Email API.

No. You can write and preview HTML templates in the dashboard code editor, or manage template files from your repository using the API, CLI, and MCP tools. If your team builds templates with React Email, you can compile them to HTML with Bird personalization placeholders intact and sync the output to the same drafts and published versions visible in the dashboard.

Templates use Liquid placeholders to merge dynamic data into subject lines, preview text, and message bodies. When you send a broadcast, Bird populates contact placeholders automatically from each recipient's saved profile attributes and fallback values. When you send transactional emails through the API, you can pass custom parameters such as order numbers or line items and use Liquid conditionals and loops to format the message.

Yes. Edits are saved to a working draft while live traffic continues using your currently published version. When you publish a change, Bird creates a version snapshot, and you can roll back to any earlier snapshot with one click if you spot a mistake, without affecting messages that have already been accepted for delivery.

Yes. A single template can store localized subject lines, preview text, and HTML bodies for multiple languages alongside a default fallback language. You can choose whether sends requesting an untranslated locale fall back to your default language or return an error, and preview each locale with sample recipient data before publishing.

We generate the records for you: a DKIM TXT record to sign your mail, a return-path CNAME that aligns SPF (no apex SPF record required), and a DMARC TXT record. A tracking CNAME for branded open and click links is optional. Add the domain, paste the records at your DNS provider, and hit verify: most verifications resolve within minutes of DNS propagation, though it can occasionally take longer.

DMARC tells receiving servers what to do with mail that fails DKIM or SPF alignment, and where to send the aggregate reports that show who is sending as your domain. We require a DMARC record before a domain can send, and recommend starting at p=none, which monitors without affecting delivery. Once you have confirmed every legitimate source aligns, tighten the policy to p=quarantine or p=reject. If you already publish DMARC at your domain or a parent domain, we use it as is. Major inbox providers now expect bulk senders to publish a policy, so having one is increasingly part of reaching the inbox at volume.

Yes to both, and we recommend a dedicated subdomain, since it isolates your email reputation from your corporate mail. You can also run separate domains for transactional and marketing mail, or one per brand, each with its own authentication and reputation.

Consider a dedicated IP when you send consistent volume and need control over your own IP reputation. A low-volume or irregular sender may be better served by the shared pool. Bird warms a new dedicated IP automatically over roughly 30 days, with overflow routed through shared infrastructure during the ramp. Review your sending pattern with an email specialist before choosing.

Yes. Group IPs into pools and route each traffic type to its own pool. This separates the IPs carrying your campaign and transactional streams. Authentication, domain reputation and recipient engagement still matter for both.

Bird handles SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, dedicated IP pools with automated warmup, bounce and complaint suppressions, unsubscribe preferences, and real-time delivery analytics. You control list acquisition, message content, and sending cadence, and you can pair those controls with Inbox Insights to monitor inbox placement across providers.

Start in the dashboard or analytics API by breaking down bounce reasons and spam complaints by sending domain and mailbox provider, such as Gmail or Yahoo. You can inspect individual delivery attempts in the email log to see exact server responses, and use Inbox Insights to run seed tests or check whether providers are routing your mail to spam.

No. Health statuses like Healthy, Watching, and Throttled give you an early warning when bounce or complaint rates rise, without automatically pausing your traffic or changing your rate limits. Your team stays in control of whether to pause a broadcast or clean an audience while investigating.

When an address hard bounces, Bird adds it to your suppression list and blocks future sends to protect your sender reputation. Spam complaints and unsubscribes automatically stop future marketing emails to that recipient while allowing critical transactional messages, such as password resets or receipts, to reach valid addresses.

Hard bounces create suppressions for all mail; complaints create suppressions for non-transactional mail. Manual suppressions block all categories. Soft bounces and deferrals do not create permanent recipient suppressions.

An unsubscribe records the recipient’s preference on the Preferences tab. It is separate from the suppression list. Both are checked when deciding whether to deliver, and deleting a contact does not erase its opt-out.

You can remove a suppression through the dashboard or API after investigating its cause. Removing one does not remove other blocking records or opt-out preferences. The suppressed@messagebird.dev sandbox address lets you test a rejected recipient without changing your list.

Use Email Lookup with an API key scoped for lookup. Submit one address and read its result, delivery confidence, risk flags and any typo suggestion. The dashboard, SDKs and CLI provide ways to try the same lookup.

The documented results are valid, neutral, risky, undeliverable and typo. Treat result as an open vocabulary and handle future values using delivery confidence. The valid boolean is the provider’s validity assessment; read it alongside the result and confidence, since it does not guarantee delivery.

Offer a typo suggestion for the person to confirm; never silently replace their address. Neutral means the mailbox could not be confirmed either way. Combine the result and confidence with your consent and sending policy.

No. A lookup helps assess address quality at that moment. It does not establish consent, remove opt-out preferences or guarantee inbox placement. Continue to honor suppression and preference records.

Use the batch API to assess up to 1,000 addresses in one request, within the 128 KiB request limit. Results follow submission order, including duplicates. Each answered entry is billed. Check the documented replay limits before retrying a batch; this page does not provide a list-upload control.

You can track delivered messages, opens, clicks, bounces, spam complaints, and delivery latency. Filter and group performance by sending domain, recipient domain, mailbox provider, tag, template, or broadcast to spot trends quickly. You can also inspect delivery and bounce rates by sending IP to monitor infrastructure health.

Analytics update within minutes as delivery and engagement events arrive, and each report includes a freshness timestamp so you know how current the numbers are. Metrics are recorded when the event happens, meaning a link clicked on Tuesday appears in Tuesday's activity even if the email was sent earlier in the week. You can query hourly or daily rollups across the dashboard and reporting API.

Delivery metrics confirm that the recipient's mail server accepted your message. To see whether accepted emails land in the primary inbox or the spam folder across major providers, use Inbox Insights, and use Competitive Insights to benchmark competing brands. To measure revenue or signups, pass campaign tags or link parameters into your application's analytics.

No. You can generate a Bird forwarding address in seconds and forward emails from your existing inbox to start testing right away. When you are ready to receive mail directly on your own brand, you can configure a receiving subdomain.

Yes. Register and verify a dedicated subdomain in Bird, enable inbound receiving, and publish the provided MX records in your DNS. Using a dedicated subdomain lets Bird process application replies and support tickets while your primary domain continues routing employee mail to Google Workspace or Microsoft 365.

Bird sends a webhook notification to your server as soon as an incoming email arrives, and your app can fetch the parsed subject, plain text, HTML body, headers, and attachments through the API. You can verify webhook signatures to confirm each request came from Bird and rely on automatic retries if your endpoint is temporarily unavailable.

Inbound email turns incoming messages on your receiving domain or forwarding address into structured webhook events and parsed content for your backend. Agent Mailboxes give each AI agent or support workflow a dedicated inbox that tracks multi-turn conversation threads, filters unwanted senders, and sends replies in context.

Inbound email parses incoming messages and forwards them to your webhook endpoint for one-way processing. An agent mailbox gives your AI agent or support app a persistent inbox that groups messages into conversation threads, strips quoted reply history to keep prompts clean, enforces sender admission rules, and sends threaded replies.

Yes. You can create mailboxes on any verified domain or subdomain where you have enabled inbound receiving. For quick setup without DNS changes, you can also provision a generated or custom handle on Bird's managed inbox domain, which stays reserved to your workspace even if you delete the mailbox later.

Parsed message headers, clean extracted text, and attachments are stored for 30, 90, or 365 days based on the retention period you choose for your plan. Raw MIME files and unparsed original bodies are kept for 30 days so you can debug formatting or delivery issues.

Yes. Configure mailbox webhooks to trigger your agent automatically whenever an admitted message lands in the inbox, or connect to the live event stream for real-time updates during an active session. If a streaming connection drops, your agent can list recent thread messages through the API to catch up on anything that arrived while disconnected.

Inbox Insights is the current Bird dashboard experience for inbox placement and seed testing, replacing the older Inbox Tracker name. If your organization uses a standalone eDataSource or legacy Tracker account, you can continue signing in through that platform's existing portal and support team.

Your delivery rate shows how many emails were accepted by recipient mail servers, which includes messages that later get filtered into spam. Inbox Insights shows where those accepted messages actually land across major mailbox providers, breaking down primary inbox versus spam folder placement alongside your delivery metrics.

Verify your sending domain in a workspace with Inbox Insights enabled and turn on domain tracking. Once active, panel placement estimates populate for supported mailbox providers as your domain sends volume, and you can run seed tests using your plan's seed testing allowance.

No. Creating a seed test reserves a set of test addresses for you to include in your campaign audience or pre-send test list before the expiration date. Placement results populate in your dashboard as those seed mailboxes receive your email, and reserving a test uses one test from your allowance.

You can see inbox, spam, and missing counts for each measured mailbox provider, verify that SPF, DKIM, and DMARC passed on the received messages, and compare how engaged versus dormant test mailboxes filtered your campaign.

Inbox Insights is designed for interactive investigation in the Bird dashboard, where you can inspect placement trends and seed test results visually. For programmatic reporting on your sent volume, bounces, opens, and clicks, use the Email analytics API.

Yes. Competitive Insights is the Bird dashboard tool for tracking competing brands and benchmarking their email programs, replacing the older Competitive Tracker name. If your team uses a legacy standalone account, you can continue accessing it through its existing sign-in and support path.

Competitive Insights estimates volume and engagement from a representative panel of consumer mailboxes, tracking each watched brand's primary high-volume sending domain. Mail sent from secondary domains or very low-volume senders may not appear in the panel sample.

Yes. The campaign feed displays captured subject lines and rendered email screenshots when available from the panel. It focuses on observed broadcast campaigns to help you review messaging, cadence, and seasonal promotions across your industry.

Treat them as complementary signals. Competitor read rates come from observed mailbox activity in the measurement panel, whereas your own open rates come from tracking pixels in the emails you send. The dashboard labels panel estimates alongside your own delivery metrics so you can compare directional trends accurately.

Yes. Each brand profile lists the detected email service provider when the panel can identify it from message headers and sending infrastructure. If a sender's provider cannot be verified from observed mail, the field stays blank.

Open Competitive Insights in the Bird dashboard, search for competitors by brand name or sending domain, and add them to your watchlist up to your plan's brand allowance. You can also book a demo with our team to check panel coverage for your industry before you subscribe.

Both are self-managed mail transfer agents for organizations that run their own sending infrastructure. Momentum MTA is designed for carrier-grade, high-volume environments that need deep policy customization and routing control. PowerMTA gives enterprise senders high-throughput delivery and granular queue management on their own hardware or public cloud instances in AWS, Azure, or GCP.

Momentum MTA and PowerMTA fit enterprises and mailbox providers whose compliance or infrastructure policies require running dedicated mail servers on-premises or in their own cloud. Inbox Insights and Competitive Insights are cloud tools in the Bird dashboard for any sender who wants inbox placement testing and competitor benchmarking, and you can use both without self-hosting an MTA.

SparkPost is part of Bird. Bird Email provides the sending, campaign and delivery workflows for new projects. An existing SparkPost integration is a separate integration: review its API calls, domain records and events with your account team before planning a move.

Bird Email has its own API and SDKs. Review the sending, templates, domain and webhook guides rather than assuming that a SparkPost request can be sent unchanged.

Momentum is our on-premises email infrastructure platform for high-volume sending, with customizable workflows, routing, and delivery parameters set through its Policy Manager. It is built to scale with your sending volume while keeping performance stable, and it supports full Unicode (SMTPUTF8) so you can send to international character sets.

Adaptive Delivery is Momentum's automatic traffic shaping. It watches how each mailbox provider responds to your mail and adjusts in real time: throttling, deferring, or briefly pausing a stream to protect your reputation, then ramping back up once things clear. You reach the inbox without manually babysitting send rates for every provider. The Intelligence Router shows you this happening across all your data sources, with real-time alerts whenever it makes an adjustment.

Yes to both. Momentum runs on your own servers, on any major cloud, or split across the two, so you can match it to your infrastructure, cost, and compliance needs and change that mix over time. It also keeps shipping: recent releases keep it current with modern operating systems, TLS 1.3, and up-to-date security and SMTP standards, and expose message events through real-time APIs you can feed into your own reporting and automation.

Yes. PowerMTA can relay some traffic to the hosted Bird Email API while delivering the rest straight from your own servers, which is the simplest way to try the hosted platform or migrate gradually without moving everything at once. PowerMTA itself runs on infrastructure you own, so those IPs stay yours to manage. Traffic you relay to the hosted platform can use our IPs there, or your own dedicated IPs, while everything else stays entirely under your control.

Virtual MTAs let you run several independent sending streams inside one PowerMTA instance, each with its own IPs, reputation, and limits. Use them to manage transactional mail, marketing mail or different customers separately. Shared domains and recipient-provider policies can still affect delivery across streams.

Yes. API requests require HTTPS, and SMTP submission requires TLS encryption on port 465 or a completed STARTTLS upgrade on ports 587 and 2525 before authentication is accepted, keeping your credentials encrypted in transit. Unencrypted submission on port 25 is disabled. To keep data in your chosen region, send through the regional endpoint that matches your API key; Bird's official SDKs and CLI detect the key's region prefix and route requests automatically.

You choose the exact read or write permissions for each API key across email sending, marketing campaigns, and domain management, so a key created for an application server to send receipts cannot modify your domains or access unrelated resources. Administrative actions such as managing team members, workspace settings, API keys, and IP pools require an authenticated user session. You can also attach an IP address allowlist to any key so requests from unfamiliar networks are rejected.

When you rotate an API key, Bird issues a replacement key immediately and keeps the previous key active for a configurable grace period (24 hours by default) so you can roll out the new credential across your services without dropping traffic. If a key is compromised, you can set the grace period to zero to revoke it right away, and you can assign a custom expiration date to the new key if your security policy requires periodic rotation.

Yes. Bird supports enterprise single sign-on over SAML 2.0 and OIDC with identity providers such as Okta, Microsoft Entra ID, and Google Workspace. Your account team can enable SSO for your organization, and team members who sign in with an email and password can enable multi-factor authentication on their own accounts.

Yes. The organization audit log records configuration and administrative changes in a read-only timeline showing the actor, workspace, timestamp, and outcome, and you can export entries in OCSF format to your SIEM. The audit log tracks account and infrastructure actions, while individual sent and received emails are recorded in the email log.

You can download compliance certifications and security documentation from the Bird Trust Center at trust.bird.com, and review our data processing agreement, privacy statement, and acceptable use policy at bird.com/legal. If your procurement or security team requires a custom vendor questionnaire, contact your account team.