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Deliverability

Sending a message and having it arrive are two different problems. Every channel Bird supports — email today, others as they come online — sits behind gatekeepers (mailbox providers, carriers) that decide whether your message reaches the recipient, lands in a junk folder, or disappears. That decision is driven by one asset: your sender reputation. This page explains the model that holds across channels; the per-channel mechanics live in the leaf pages, starting with email.

Reputation is the asset

Gatekeepers do not evaluate messages in isolation — they evaluate senders. Every message you send either builds or erodes a track record attached to your sending identity, and that track record is what gets consulted the next time you send. Reputation is earned slowly and lost quickly: months of consistent, wanted traffic build trust that a single bad campaign can burn. Treat it like the production asset it is.
Four behaviors dominate how gatekeepers score you:
  • Authentication. Proving the message really comes from the identity it claims. Unauthenticated traffic is indistinguishable from spoofing, and gatekeepers increasingly refuse it outright rather than merely scoring it down.
  • Recipient engagement. Gatekeepers watch what recipients do — open, read, reply, delete-without-reading, mark as spam. Sending to people who want your messages is the single strongest positive signal, and no technical configuration substitutes for it.
  • Complaint and bounce behavior. Repeatedly messaging addresses that do not exist, or recipients who report you, is the classic spammer signature. Reacting to bounces and complaints — and never messaging those recipients again — is table stakes.
  • Sending consistency. Reputation systems trust patterns. Steady, predictable volume from a known identity scores well; sudden spikes from a cold or dormant identity look exactly like compromised infrastructure, regardless of how legitimate the traffic is.

The inputs you control

Bird sends your traffic through its dedicated sending infrastructure, and the platform-level reputation work — keeping shared infrastructure healthy, pacing traffic, processing delivery feedback — happens for you. Two levers remain yours, and they are the same two on every channel:
  • Prove your identity. Verifying your sending identity (for email, domain authentication via DNS records) is the gate before traffic flows, and it is what lets your reputation accrue to you rather than to a generic platform identity. Gatekeepers can only trust a sender they can recognize.
  • Isolate your reputation — or pool it. By default you send through shared infrastructure, where Bird's established reputation carries you and your track record blends with other customers'. Dedicated infrastructure (for email, dedicated IPs and pools) gives you an identity that is judged on your traffic alone — better when your volume is high and clean, worse when it is low or erratic, because a dedicated identity starts cold and must earn trust through warmup.
Everything else — list hygiene, opt-in practice, content quality, send cadence — is behavior rather than configuration, and it matters more than any of the configuration.

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