Our Story
Built by someone who lived the problem
InboxPlease exists because the standard tools were measuring the wrong thing. We fix that with one principle: you can only test real-world delivery in the real world.
How InboxPlease came to be
Early 2010s
Running email infrastructure for early SaaS
Chris Aylott spent the early part of the 2010s managing email infrastructure for a string of early-stage SaaS businesses. The job was unglamorous but critical: configure the sending domains, keep the IPs warm, monitor reputation, make sure the product emails actually arrived. Most of the time it worked. Sometimes it catastrophically didn't.
The pattern that kept repeating
Green scores, cratered open rates
Campaign after campaign would see open rates fall off a cliff overnight. Chris would check every deliverability tool available and get back the same answer: everything looks fine. Sender score: good. IP reputation: clean. Spam reports: negligible. But real users on Gmail, on Outlook, on Yahoo weren't seeing the messages. They were landing in spam folders nobody checked.
"Every dashboard told me I was fine. The open rates told me something completely different. I kept asking the same question: which one is lying? It took me too long to realise they were both telling the truth about different things."
— Chris Aylott
The root cause
Synthetic seed networks don't filter like Gmail
The deliverability tools of the era ran on synthetic seed networks: pools of controlled inboxes that the vendors owned and managed. They were cheap to operate and easy to report on. They were also fundamentally useless for the question Chris needed answered. A fake inbox that a vendor controls doesn't apply Gmail's engagement signals, reputation models, or user-behaviour filters. It just accepts mail. So the tools were measuring whether mail arrived at a mailbox that would never reject it — not whether it would survive the filters that billions of real recipients use every day.
2019
The first version of InboxPlease
In 2019, Chris built the first internal version of InboxPlease around a single insight: if you want to know where email actually lands, you have to test it against real inboxes with real filtering — the kind actual people use. Not a controlled sandbox. Not a vendor-owned seed pool. A genuine, organic network of real accounts operating under the same conditions as your recipients.
The second frustration
Privacy-first by necessity, not marketing
While building InboxPlease, Chris evaluated every warmup and deliverability tool on the market. Every single one demanded full inbox access. Read permissions, folder access, full message history — the works. That felt wrong. A tool meant to help you send better email shouldn't need to read everything you've ever received. So InboxPlease was architected from day one to work on send-only permissions. It's not a constraint worked around; it's the design. Your inbox stays yours.
Our mission
Give every sender accurate, honest intelligence about where their email actually lands — without asking for access they shouldn't have to give.
Real testing
We test against real inboxes with real filtering — not synthetic seed pools.
Send-only access
We never ask for read permissions. Your inbox content is none of our business.
Honest data
A green score should mean green. We don't report what's easy — we report what's true.
See for yourself what real testing looks like
Run a free inbox placement test right now, no account needed. Or start a free trial to see InboxPlease working on your own domain.