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Email Placement Test – FAQ

plusvibe.ai Support Team avatar
Written by plusvibe.ai Support Team
Updated this week

Does automatic email placement testing require an additional subscription?

Yes.

Automatic email placement testing is offered as an add-on subscription on top of your existing PlusVibe plan.

We offer three placement test plans — Starter, Pro, and Scale — each with different features and monthly credit limits.


How are placement test credits used?

Credits are consumed per sender account, per test run.

  • 1 sender account = 1 credit

This applies regardless of:

  • How many recipient types you select

  • How many seed emails are sent per recipient

Example:
If you run a placement test on 5 sender accounts, the test will consume 5 credits, even if multiple recipient inboxes are included.


Why does my placement test show 100% Inbox, but my real campaign still hits Spam?

Email placement tests send a small number of test emails to seed inboxes and measure where they land (Inbox, Promotions, Spam).

Real campaigns behave differently because:

  • Volume is much higher, triggering spam filters more aggressively

  • Sending patterns matter (burst speed, concurrency, timing)

  • Recipient behavior varies (opens, replies, deletes, ignores)

  • Reputation evolves over time, not from just a few emails

A perfect placement test means your setup is capable of inboxing — not that every campaign email will inbox at scale.

Think of placement tests as a health check, not a delivery guarantee.


Why don’t you offer a warm-up feature for placement test seed accounts?

Some tools “warm up” their seed accounts by interacting with your emails (opening, moving from spam to inbox, replying).
This creates biased results.

Once a seed account interacts positively with a sender:

  • It no longer represents a neutral recipient

  • Results become artificially inflated

  • Inbox rates look better than reality

Our approach:

  • Seed accounts never interact with your emails

  • No opens, replies, or spam-to-inbox moves

  • Results stay objective, neutral, and repeatable

This gives you real signal, not false confidence.


What does “Missing Email” mean in a placement test?

A “Missing” email means the test email was not found in any folder (Inbox, Promotions, Spam).

Common reasons include:

  • Blocked or filtered by your sending server

  • Rejected or silently dropped by the recipient server

  • Filtered before mailbox delivery

  • Temporary routing or reputation-based suppression

If a test email is not detected within 1 hour after sending, it is marked as Missing.

Missing emails are often a strong deliverability warning sign.


Why is there sometimes a delay in detecting placement test results?

Delays are usually caused by sending infrastructure, not the test itself.

Common reasons:

  • SMTP throttling (email accepted but queued)

  • Provider-side sending queues

  • Dynamically applied rate limits

  • Temporary reputation or traffic shaping


Should I run placement tests on every sender account?

No — and doing so can actually hurt deliverability.

Why:

  • Content fatigue
    Providers dislike seeing identical content repeatedly across many senders.

  • Wasted sending capacity
    Placement tests consume sending power that could be used for real campaigns.

  • Unnecessary noise
    Sender reputation is influenced by patterns, not isolated tests.

Best practice:

  • Test representative sender accounts

  • Rotate content between tests

  • Test when something changes (domain, copy, infrastructure, volume) — not constantly


When will features like blacklist checks and spam filter checks be available?

We’re actively working on these features and plan to roll them out shortly.

Blacklist checks and spam filter analysis will be part of our ongoing deliverability feature expansion, helping you diagnose issues before they impact campaigns.

Updates will be announced as soon as these features go live.


What kind of domains are used for seed accounts?

We use realistic, natural-looking domains for our seed accounts — domains that closely resemble normal end-user inboxes.

Some tools rely on obvious testing domains (e.g. placement-test.com, sl-placement.com). These can be easily recognized by spam filters and may produce distorted results.

By using realistic domains:

  • Spam filters treat test emails more like real traffic

  • Results better reflect real-world delivery behavior

  • Inbox, Promotions, and Spam placement is more reliable

This ensures your placement test results are as close as possible to real campaign conditions.

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