Inbox placement, measured in real inboxes
Send from your own mailboxes to a panel of seed inboxes across Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo, then see where every one of them landed: primary inbox, a category tab, spam, or never arrived at all. A paid add-on on any plan, from $23 a month.
Start my free trialYour sending platform can tell you a message was accepted. It cannot tell you what the receiving server did next, and that is the part that decides whether anyone reads it. A 99% delivery rate and a campaign sitting in everyone's junk folder look identical from the sending side.
Inbox Placement closes that gap by checking the other end. It sends your real subject and body from your real sending mailboxes into a panel of seed inboxes we own and can read, then reports where each probe ended up, per provider and per sending mailbox. Alongside the placement result it checks the authentication records on every sending domain, checks that domain and any dedicated sending IP against 23 DNS blocklists, and scores your copy against SpamAssassin-style content rules. It is a paid add-on, bought inside the app on top of any Emailchaser plan.
How a placement test runs
Pick the mailboxes you actually send from
Choose any of your connected sending accounts, as many as you like. The test measures those mailboxes, not a shared sending IP that has nothing to do with your campaigns.
Write the subject and body you plan to use
Placement is decided partly by what the email says, so the test sends your real copy rather than a neutral placeholder that would score better than your campaign does.
We send a probe from every mailbox to every seed
Emailchaser sends one probe email from each selected mailbox to each mailbox in a panel of seed inboxes across Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Yahoo and other providers.
We read every seed inbox and record where it landed
Each seed mailbox is checked for the probe: primary inbox, spam, a Gmail category tab, or never arrived at all. Nothing is inferred from an open or a bounce code.
You get a result per provider and per sending mailbox
The report breaks down both ways, so you can see that Outlook is the problem, or that one mailbox out of eight is, instead of a single blended percentage that hides both.
The four things a probe can do
Every seed mailbox produces one of these four results. Two of them are reported with a caveat, and the caveats are on the cards rather than in a footnote.
Primary inbox
The probe arrived where you wanted it. This is the only outcome that means your campaign is being read on that provider.
A Gmail category tab
Delivered, but filed under Promotions, Social or Updates. We can only report the tab on seeds we read through the provider API - IMAP does not expose which tab a message was filed under, so those seeds report inbox or spam and nothing finer.
Spam
The provider accepted the message and filed it in the junk folder. Recoverable, and usually a content, authentication or reputation problem you can name from the same report.
Never arrived
The message was accepted at the door and then never appeared anywhere in the seed mailbox. We report this separately from spam because it usually means a silent block, which is a worse and different problem than a spam placement.
What the same test checks for you
SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX
Every sending domain in the test is checked for all four records, with the actual published value shown. The same check is free and signup-free on our deliverability test if you only need the records.
23 DNS blocklists, each with a way off
Your sending domain and any dedicated sending IP are checked against 23 DNS blocklists. Every listing comes with the delisting link for that specific list, because a listing you cannot act on is trivia.
Spam-trigger scoring on your real copy
The subject and body are scored against SpamAssassin-style content rules, and each rule that fires is shown with the fix. This is the one part of placement you can change in five minutes.
Ongoing domain, mailbox and IP health
Domain, sending-account and IP health are monitored between tests, so a mailbox that starts degrading shows up as a change rather than as a bad quarter you notice later.
ESP and deliverability insights
Results are grouped by receiving provider, so you can see that your mail is fine at Google and filtered at Microsoft, which are two completely different fixes.
Shared across every workspace
One add-on covers all the workspaces on your account. Agencies running a workspace per client do not buy it per client.
23 blocklists, not 400+
Instantly advertises checks against 400+ blocklists. We check 23, and we think the smaller number is the better product.
- Most of the lists in a 400+ count are zones no mailbox provider consults. Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo do not query them, so a listing on one changes nothing about where your email lands.
- A long list makes a report look thorough and makes it useless. Twenty amber rows you cannot act on train you to ignore the two that matter.
- Every list we check has a delisting route, and we show it next to the listing. If we could not tell you how to get off a list, we would not put it in the report.
Our free blacklist checker runs a smaller set of the same kind of lookup live in your browser, with no signup, against an IP or a domain you type in. The add-on runs all 23 server-side, against every sending domain in a test, and repeats them as the tests repeat.
What Inbox Placement costs
Two tiers, bought inside the app on top of any Emailchaser plan, and one subscription covers every workspace on your account.
Growth Inbox Placement
Test whenever you want, from up to 20 sending accounts at a time.
or $220.80 a year, which is $18.40 a month
Instantly Growth: $47/month, or $37.60/month billed annually.
- Inbox placement reports
- Unlimited one-time deliverability tests
- Up to 20 sending accounts per test
- ESP and deliverability insights
- Domain, sending-account and IP health monitoring
- Blacklist checks
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC checks
- Spam-trigger scoring on every test
- Shared across all your workspaces
Hypergrowth Inbox Placement
Everything in Growth, running on a schedule instead of when you remember.
or $451.20 a year, which is $37.60 a month
Instantly Hypergrowth: $97/month, or $77.60/month billed annually.
- Everything in Growth Inbox Placement
- Unlimited automated and recurring tests
- Advanced deliverability triggers and actions
Instantly's figures are its published prices for its Growth and Hypergrowth plans, read from its own pricing page as of August 2026, with its 20% annual discount applied to the annual number. The two sides are not the same kind of line item and we are not going to pretend otherwise: ours is an add-on price on top of an Emailchaser plan, theirs is the price of the plan. Prices change, so check both before you rely on either. Our plans are on the pricing page.
Measuring placement is not warming up
These two things get sold together and they are close to opposites. A placement test measures where your email lands and hands you the reasons. A warmup pool manufactures opens and replies on mail nobody wanted, hoping to change where your email lands. Emailchaser ships a real ramp and an opt-in warm-up pool, and is explicit about which half of that is simulated engagement. Our full argument, with the sources, is in does email warm-up work?
If you only need the free half of this - the SPF, DKIM, DMARC and MX records your domain publishes today - the deliverability test runs without an account. Inbox Placement is what you buy when the records are already right and your email still is not being read.
Inbox placement FAQ
What is an inbox placement test?
An inbox placement test sends a real email from your own sending mailboxes to a panel of seed inboxes at the major mailbox providers, then reads each of those seed mailboxes to see where the message ended up. It is the only way to know whether your email reaches the primary inbox, because your sending platform can only tell you that a message was accepted by the receiving server, not what the receiving server did with it afterwards.
How does Emailchaser's inbox placement test work?
You pick which of your connected mailboxes to send from, write the subject and body you plan to use, and Emailchaser sends a probe email from every selected mailbox to every mailbox in the seed panel, which spans Gmail and Google Workspace, Outlook and Microsoft 365, Yahoo and other providers. We then read each seed mailbox and record whether the probe landed in the primary inbox, in spam, in a Gmail category tab, or never arrived at all. Results are reported per provider and per sending mailbox.
How much does Inbox Placement cost?
It is a paid add-on on top of any Emailchaser plan, in two tiers. Growth Inbox Placement is $23 a month, or $220.80 a year, which works out at $18.40 a month. Hypergrowth Inbox Placement is $47 a month, or $451.20 a year, which works out at $37.60 a month. Both are bought inside the app, and one subscription covers every workspace on your account.
Why do you check 23 blocklists when other tools check 400 or more?
Because the other 380 do not decide anything. Most of the zones in a 400+ count are lists no mailbox provider queries, so a listing on one has no effect on where your email lands, and a report full of them buries the handful of listings that do matter. We check 23 lists that are worth checking, and every listing we report comes with the delisting route for that specific list.
What does “never arrived” mean, and why is it not counted as spam?
It means the receiving server accepted the message and then the message never appeared anywhere in the seed mailbox, not in the inbox and not in the junk folder. That normally indicates a silent block, which is a worse problem than a spam placement and needs a different fix, so folding it into a spam number would hide it. We report it as its own outcome.
Can you tell me if my email went to the Promotions tab?
On the seeds we read through the provider API, yes: the report names the tab. On seeds we read over IMAP we cannot, because IMAP does not expose which Gmail category a message was filed under, so those seeds report inbox or spam and nothing finer. We would rather say that than show you a tab breakdown that is partly guessed.
Is inbox placement testing the same as email warmup?
No, and they are close to opposites. A placement test measures where your email lands. A warmup pool manufactures engagement on mail nobody wanted, to try to change where it lands. Emailchaser ships both a ramp and an opt-in warm-up pool, and says so on the email warmup page, but the placement report is the part that tells you the truth rather than trying to influence it.
Will a placement test fix my deliverability?
On its own, no. It tells you exactly where you stand and, through the authentication, blocklist and content checks that run with it, usually why. Fixing it is still yours to do: publish the missing records, get off the lists that matter, cut the phrases that scored, and drop volume on the mailboxes that are struggling. The value of the test is that you stop guessing which of those is your problem.
Still not convinced?
Read dozens of customer reviews.
P.s. these are actually real reviews (not fake G2 reviews) 🙂
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