What Is Inbox Placement?
Inbox placement is the percentage of your sent emails that land in the recipient’s primary inbox rather than the spam, junk, or promotions folder. It is the truest measure of deliverability, because an email that is accepted by the server but filed in spam is rarely seen.
Delivery rate and inbox placement are not the same thing. A message can be "delivered" (accepted by the receiving server) yet still be filtered into spam. Inbox placement rate (IPR) measures where the email actually lands, which is what determines whether a human ever reads it.
Placement is measured with seed lists: known test addresses across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, and other providers. You send to the seeds and record how many landed in inbox versus spam versus promotions, broken down per provider. Good cold-outreach senders aim for 90%+ inbox placement.
Placement varies by provider and by content, so per-ESP breakdowns matter. A domain can sit at 95% inbox on Gmail but 60% on Outlook — a gap you can only see with placement monitoring, not with a single blended "deliverability score."
MailPilot runs live placement tests and shows inbox vs spam vs promotions per provider, so you see exactly where your emails land instead of guessing from a score.
Explore placement monitoring →