Chris Aylott
Over a decade building email infrastructure for SaaS businesses. Founded InboxPlease in 2019 to solve the problem he kept hitting himself: deliverability tools that reported green while campaigns landed in spam.
Background
Chris spent the early part of the 2010s managing email infrastructure for a string of early-stage SaaS businesses — configuring sending domains, monitoring IP reputation, keeping warmup on track, and making sure product emails actually arrived. The work was unglamorous but critical: email was the backbone of every go-to-market motion, from onboarding to cold outreach to transactional delivery.
The tools available at the time shared the same fundamental problem: they all tested deliverability against synthetic seed networks — pools of vendor-controlled inboxes that accepted everything. Sender scores looked fine. But real users on Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo were sending emails straight to spam. The dashboards reported green. The open rates told a different story.
In 2019, Chris built the first version of InboxPlease around a single principle: if you want to know where email lands, test it against real inboxes with real filtering. The product has been in active development since, adding AI-powered warmup, blacklist monitoring, and sender reputation tools — all built on the same foundation of honest, real-world testing.
Read the full InboxPlease storyArticles
Email warmup for cold outreach
Why new domains need warmup before campaign volume, and how long it actually takes.
How to test email inbox placement
What a real placement test measures and why synthetic seed networks miss the point.
Email blacklist monitoring
Which blacklists matter, how fast listings happen, and what continuous monitoring catches.
How to fix email sender reputation
The signals mailbox providers use to score senders and how to move them in the right direction.
Email inbox placement for sales teams
Why cold outreach faces structurally higher placement risk than marketing email.
AI email deliverability software
What AI actually does in deliverability tools — and what it cannot do.
Does email warmup work?
The evidence for and against warmup, and when it makes a measurable difference.
Why your warmup score looks good but emails go to spam
The gap between warmup metrics and real inbox placement — and how to close it.
Try the tool Chris built
Free inbox placement test — no account required. See exactly where your email lands at Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo in 60 seconds.