Recovery service · 2026

Your sending reputation is broken. We get it back.

Active intervention service for senders whose deliverability has collapsed. Not a dashboard, not a SaaS — a senior engineer doing hands-on warm-up, list cleaning, IP rotation, blacklist removal, and ISP-level engagement rebuild for 30 or 90 days. We tell you upfront if your case is recoverable. Pricing from € 1,500 one-off.

30-day emergency · € 1,500
90-day structured · € 3,500
Retainer · € 1,200/mo
Honest about unrecoverable cases
Direct engineer access

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When to call us

You probably already know. The signals are unmissable once you see them.

Sudden cliff in inbox placement. Last week you were at 75% inbox, this week 25%. Something specific happened — a bad campaign, a list purchase, a security incident, a config change. The reputation collapsed quickly and now everything you send lands in spam.
Slow decline that nobody noticed. Six months ago your open rate was 24%, now it is 12%. No single event explains it. The reputation has been degrading silently as list quality eroded, engagement signals weakened, and ISP filtering tightened around you.
Specific ISP suspension. Gmail bouncing your mail with 421-4.7.x codes. Outlook giving you 550-5.7.515. Yahoo silently dropping 40% of your traffic. The rest of the world is fine, but a major ISP has decided you are untrustworthy.
Blacklist hit you cannot remove. Spamhaus, Barracuda, UCEPROTECT, SORBS — one or several of them flagged you, and your removal requests are not working because the underlying behaviour did not change.
Compliance enforcement. The Gmail/Yahoo/Microsoft 2024-2025 enforcement caught you on a bad day, your DMARC alignment broke, and the rejections are climbing.

Each of these maps to a different recovery path. The first conversation we have is figuring out which one applies to you.

2026 reality

Reputation recovery in 2026 is harder than it was in 2022.

The mailbox provider reputation engines did not stay still while you were running your program. Three changes since 2024 reshaped what recovery looks like, and pretending otherwise wastes money. If you are about to spend on this work, understand what you are actually paying for.

First, domain reputation became dramatically stickier than IP reputation. Industry timelines previously treated the two as comparable. The 2026 consensus across multiple deliverability sources is that IP reputation recovers in 2-4 weeks with clean sending, while domain reputation takes 6-12 weeks. Gmail and Microsoft both weight domain reputation more heavily than IP reputation in their scoring, which means switching ESPs (a common DIY "fix") rarely solves the actual problem when the problem is domain-level.

Second, delisting without remediation triggers immediate relisting. Spamhaus made this explicit in 2024 and the other major lists followed. The pre-2022 playbook of "submit delist request, get back to sending" stopped working — most lists now scan re-listed senders within 24-72 hours and re-flag if the underlying behavior did not change. This means recovery work has to fix the root cause before requesting delisting, not after.

Third, complaint thresholds tightened from 0.3% to an operational 0.1%. Gmail's published threshold for the bulk sender requirements is 0.3%, but the operational reality at Postmaster Tools "good reputation" is consistently sub-0.1%. Senders running at 0.15-0.25% now look like marginal cases to the reputation engines even though they pass the published spec. This compresses the safety margin during recovery — every percentage point above 0.1% extends the timeline.

The practical consequence: 2026 recovery is more methodical and slower than the 2022 version. Quick fixes do not work. The teams winning at this are accepting longer engagement windows, fixing root causes before requesting delistings, and treating reputation as a continuous discipline rather than an emergency lever.

The three options

Recovery vs audit vs migration — three different products.

This is the most common confusion in our triage calls, and it deserves to be addressed head-on. The three are different products with different price points and different outcomes. Buying the wrong one wastes time you may not have.

Our deliverability audit is a diagnostic engagement. A senior engineer spends 8-12 hours going through your DNS, your sending history, your MTA configuration, your content, your list quality, and produces a written report (12-30 pages) explaining exactly what is broken and what to fix in what order. The deliverable is the report. You take it to your team or your provider and they ship the fixes. €299-€899 depending on scope.

This recovery service is an intervention engagement. We do not just tell you what is broken; we fix it ourselves, hands-on, over 30 or 90 days. Active warm-up running on our infrastructure feeding engagement back to your domain. List cleaning we execute, not recommend. DKIM rotation we do, not document. IP migration we run, not propose. The deliverable is your domain back in the inbox. €1,500-€3,500 fixed price.

Domain or IP migration is the third option, and it is the right answer when recovery is not. We provision clean replacement infrastructure (new domains, new IPs, fresh authentication), warm it on our network, supervise the traffic shift from your broken setup to the clean one, and retire the unrecoverable assets. This is part of the 90-day structured package when warranted, or a standalone €1,500-3,000 engagement when it is the only path forward.

If your reputation is mildly off and you want a roadmap your team can ship, buy the audit. If your reputation is in the floor and you need engineers to grab the wheel, buy recovery. If your domain has been on Spamhaus for 8 months, buy migration. Many clients buy more than one — audit first to confirm the diagnosis, then recovery to execute. The audit cost gets credited toward the recovery if you start within 30 days.

Decision framework

Recovery, migration, or do-nothing — how to choose.

The decision tree below is the same one we walk through on the diagnostic call. The branches that lead to "do not buy this" are real — sometimes the right answer is to wait, sometimes to migrate, and sometimes to walk away from the affected program entirely.

Two branches the diagram does not capture. First: when the answer is "migrate", many clients ask whether they should still pay for an audit before migrating. The answer is usually no — if you already know the domain is going away, paying for a forensic report on it is sunk cost. We migrate first, audit the new infrastructure later. Second: the "single triggering event" branch sometimes hides a structural problem that the event surfaced. We treat the obvious symptom in 30-day emergency, then if patterns suggest deeper issues we recommend extending or upgrading to 90-day structured at the prorated rate.

What recovery actually looks like — the placement curve

Below is an illustrative model showing inbox placement over 90 days for three scenarios: untreated continued decline, our 30-day emergency package, our 90-day structured package. The numbers are typical of recoverable cases; your real curve depends on starting condition, recoverability, and how much your team can ship in parallel with us.

Inbox placement trajectory — untreated vs 30-day emergency vs 90-day structured

Illustrative model. Real outcomes depend on case severity and recoverability.

Illustrative inbox placement percentages over 90 days for three scenarios
Categoría	Untreated (continuing decline)	Recovery 30-day emergency	Recovery 90-day structured
Day 0	42	42	42
Day 7	38	48	50
Day 14	33	56	58
Day 21	29	65	67
Day 30	25	72	74
Day 45	22	75	80
Day 60	19	76	84
Day 75	17	77	86
Day 90	15	78	88

Modelled on actual recovery cases handled by Blue Spirit Hosting between 2024-2026. Starting baseline of 42% reflects a typical 'reputation has collapsed' state — well below the 80%+ healthy benchmark. Untreated trajectory reflects continued decline as bad signals compound. 30-day emergency hits steady state around day 30-45 because the engagement window ends; gains are preserved if a retainer continues. 90-day structured continues climbing through full engagement and typically reaches 80%+ for moderately damaged cases. Severely damaged or structurally unrecoverable cases sit below these curves; we tell you upfront if your case is in that category.

Two things to note in the chart. First, untreated reputation does not stabilise — it decays. If the bad signals continue (and they will, because spam complaints from a damaged campaign keep arriving for weeks after sending stops), the floor keeps dropping. Recovery does not just buy you back the lift; it stops the decay.

Second, the 30-day curve plateaus around day 30-45 because that is where the engagement ends. Gains hold if you continue best practices, but they often slip without ongoing maintenance. That is what the retainer is for. The 90-day structured curve keeps climbing because the engagement keeps working through it.

How we work

Our 5-stage recovery method.

Recovery is methodical work, not a magic touch. The same five stages run on every engagement, calibrated to your case severity and the engagement length. Day-one triage, root-cause diagnosis, technical fixes, active warm-up with engagement-core sequencing, monitoring with weekly reporting. The stages overlap — diagnosis informs fixes which feed warm-up which feed monitoring — but the overall arc is consistent.

Stage 1 — Triage (24-48h)

Same-day or next-day call. We confirm the engagement scope, lock in materials we need (DNS, DMARC reports, sending logs, list samples), and identify the highest-risk symptom that needs containment first.

Stage 2 — Root-cause diagnosis

Full audit of your DNS, rDNS, MTA, content, list, and historical sending pattern. We identify what broke and when. Some cases have a single root cause; some have three or four interacting causes that we untangle in priority order.

Stage 3 — Technical fixes

DNS corrections (SPF flatten if over 10 lookups, DKIM rotation with longer keys, DMARC tightening from p=none, MTA-STS verification). MTA configuration adjustments. Bounce list reset. Suppression list cleanup. Hands-on, executed by our engineers.

Stage 4 — Active warm-up

Engagement-core warm-up: identify your most active recipients and ramp sending to them first, gradually expanding outward. Daily inbox placement testing. Per-ISP throttling adjustment based on what is working. The engine runs continuously through the engagement window.

Stage 5 — Monitoring and reporting

Daily for 30-day engagements, weekly for 90-day. Postmaster Tools metrics, seed-list placement results, blacklist status, DMARC aggregate trends. Written reports you can share internally. Direct chat for ad-hoc questions.

Optional — Domain migration

If diagnosis concludes the domain is structurally unrecoverable, the engagement pivots to migration: clean replacement domains, parallel warm-up, supervised traffic shift. Part of 90-day scope, add-on for 30-day at €800-1,500.

Recovery timeline visualised — 90-day structured engagement.

The architectural diagram below maps the 90-day structured engagement against the calendar. Stages overlap by design — diagnosis informs fixes which feed warm-up which feed monitoring — but every milestone is documented and reportable. The 30-day emergency variant compresses Stages 1-4 into the first 30 days and skips the extended monitoring tail.

Five mistakes that derail recovery — and how we avoid them

Recovery engagements fail when teams cut corners on the wrong stage. After running this work for several years, the patterns are repetitive enough to enumerate. The five mistakes below are why DIY recovery and cheap consulting engagements stall — and the discipline we maintain to avoid them.

1. Submitting delisting requests before fixing the root cause

This is the most common DIY mistake. Domain shows up on Spamhaus DBL, panic sets in, the team submits a delisting request the same day. Spamhaus delists within 24-72 hours, the team feels relief, the underlying behavior continues unchanged, and within a week the domain is re-listed — this time with an additional flag for "delisted then re-listed quickly", which makes future delistings harder. Spamhaus explicitly warns about this in their delisting documentation. Our protocol: never submit a delisting request until the root cause is fixed and we can demonstrate it. The delisting request is the last step of a recovery sequence, not the first.

2. Switching ESPs to "fix" a domain reputation problem

The intuitive logic is "if my IPs are bad, switch to a provider with better IPs". The problem is that Gmail and Microsoft both weigh domain reputation more heavily than IP reputation in 2026. Switching ESPs gives you new IPs but takes your damaged domain reputation with you. We diagnose IP-vs-domain on day one. If the domain is the problem, an ESP switch is wasted effort and money — sometimes worse, because the new ESP's reputation gets dragged down by your domain history. Fix: identify which layer is broken, then choose the intervention that addresses that layer.

3. Resuming full sending volume after delisting

The second-most-common DIY mistake. Domain gets delisted from Spamhaus, team assumes "we are back" and resumes the campaign that triggered the listing. Within 48-72 hours the same complaint patterns trigger the same blacklist signature, and now the listing is harder to clear because it is the second offense from the same source. The 2026 pattern is even more aggressive — most lists do reputation correlation across listings, so a sender with one current listing and three historical ones gets treated worse than a sender with one current listing and zero history. Our protocol: post-delisting volume ramp is 7-14 days minimum, regardless of how confident the team feels.

4. Ignoring engagement signals during warm-up

Recovery warm-up is not "send less for a while". It is "send to the right people for a while". Engagement-core warm-up means identifying the recipients most likely to open, click and reply — your most active customers, your most engaged subscribers — and ramping volume to them first. The signals these recipients send (positive engagement, low complaint rate, replies) are what rebuild reputation. Sending lower volume to the same problematic list rebuilds nothing because the same complaint signals continue, just at lower absolute count. Fix: segment the list by engagement, ramp warm-up against the engaged top 10-20% first, gradually expand outward as signals improve.

5. Not maintaining the gains after recovery

The reason we sell the retainer separately and only to clients who completed recovery: reputation maintenance is a different discipline from reputation rebuilding. Teams that successfully complete a 30-day or 90-day recovery and then assume "we are healthy now" usually slip back within 6-12 months. The slips are not catastrophic — they look like slow drift back to the original problem state — but the reputation engines treat repeat-offender domains worse than first-time-offender domains. Fix: continuous monitoring (Postmaster Tools, blacklist scans, DMARC aggregate parsing), monthly review of bounce and complaint trends, immediate action on signal degradation. The retainer formalizes this; teams that decline the retainer should set up internal equivalents.

Blacklist delisting procedures — what each list actually requires.

Not all blacklists are equivalent in 2026. Some have transparent delisting procedures with clear timelines; others have opaque or non-existent appeals. Some are consulted by the major receivers; others are essentially noise. The table below summarizes the operationally important lists, the delisting timeline once root cause is fixed, and the operational priority — which ones to fix first, which ones to ignore.

Blacklist	Delisting timeline	Receiver adoption	Procedure	Priority
Spamhaus SBL	24-72h after fix	Extremely high	Submit at spamhaus.org/lookup, fix evidence required	Fix within 24h
Spamhaus DBL	24-72h after fix	Extremely high	Domain-level; same procedure as SBL	Fix within 24h
Spamhaus CSS	Auto-clear after clean sending	High	No manual delisting; clean behavior for 7-14 days	Wait it out + clean send
Spamhaus PBL	24h via lookup tool	High for direct-to-MX	Self-delist if mail server runs static IP	Fix if direct sending
Microsoft (SNDS / Outlook)	24-48h	Required for Outlook	Submit via Sender Information Form (SNDS portal)	Fix within 24h
Barracuda BRBL	12-24h	High among Barracuda customers	Submit at barracudacentral.org with evidence	Fix within 24h
SORBS	1-3 weeks	Moderate	Per-zone procedure (DUHL, RHSBL, etc.)	Slow but worth it
SpamCop SCBL	Auto-clear in 24h after fix	Moderate	No manual procedure; FBL-based	Fix root cause; auto-clears
UCEPROTECT-L1	24-72h or paid express	Moderate	Self-delist via uceprotect.net	Fix if at scale
UCEPROTECT-L2 / L3	Tied to L1 + ASN policy	Negligible	Often automated; affects entire ASN	Ignore — no major receiver consults

The "Priority" column is what most online guides miss. UCEPROTECT-L3 is a frequent source of unnecessary panic — clients see the red exclamation mark in MXToolbox and burn two weeks trying to delist when no major receiver actually consults that list. We have specifically lost prospective clients to consultants who promised UCEPROTECT-L3 cleanup; the work is real but the impact is zero. Conversely, Spamhaus SBL or Microsoft listings need same-day attention because actual mail rejection follows quickly.

ISP-specific recovery paths — Gmail, Microsoft, Yahoo, Apple.

Each major mailbox provider has its own reputation model and its own recovery levers. Treating "recovery" as a single global activity wastes effort. The table below is the operational profile for each major ISP — what to monitor, what to fix first, what the realistic timeline looks like, and which signals matter most for that specific receiver.

ISP	Monitoring tool	Primary lever	Recovery timeline	2026 quirks
Gmail / Workspace	Google Postmaster Tools	Engagement-core warm-up + DMARC tightening	4-8 weeks for Medium → High	Domain reputation weighted heavier than IP; complaint <0.1% target
Microsoft (Outlook + 365)	SNDS + JMRP	Color-recovery via filtered traffic + complaint mitigation	3-6 weeks for Yellow → Green	May 2025 enforcement: 4.7.500-4.7.799 codes; ERR limit 2K external/24h
Yahoo / AOL	Yahoo Sender Hub	FBL active + complaint reduction	2-4 weeks (faster than Gmail)	FBL active is mandatory under bulk sender requirements
Apple iCloud / me.com	No public dashboard	Engagement signals + DMARC enforcement	3-6 weeks (no telemetry feedback)	MPP makes opens unreliable; track click engagement primarily
Yandex / Mail.ru	Yandex Postmaster	DMARC enforcement + geographic reputation	6-12 weeks (slow trust building)	Strict; geographic filtering applies; DMARC required
European regional ISPs (Web.de, Orange.fr, T-Online.de, Libero.it)	Direct postmaster contact (varies by ISP)	Local trust signals + conservative throttling; ARC sealing required (Orange.fr)	Variable, often 4-10 weeks	Reputation-led acceptance; DMARC + RDNS critical; rate limits stricter than US

The pattern across the matrix: recovery times scale with the opacity of the receiver's telemetry. Gmail Postmaster Tools is the most transparent system, which is why Gmail recovery is also the most measurable. Apple iCloud is nearly opaque, which is why Apple recovery requires patience and inference rather than direct measurement. We instrument every recovery against all available telemetry from day one — Postmaster Tools, SNDS, Yahoo Sender Hub, JMRP — and report against each weekly. If your receiver mix is dominated by one ISP, the recovery work concentrates on that ISP's specific levers.

Cost honesty

What broken reputation actually costs over 90 days.

The chart below normalizes total cost over the recovery window for the typical alternatives. The "do nothing" line is not zero — it is the accumulated revenue loss from continued degraded inbox placement. The numbers are conservative; for high-value B2B programmes the real loss is often 3-5x larger.

Total cost over 90 days — recovery options compared (EUR)

Includes spend + estimated revenue loss for each path.

Total cost over 90 days for each recovery path in EUR
Categoría	Total cost over 90 days, EUR (real loss + spend)
Do nothing (loss accumulates)	18000
DIY (engineer time + tooling)	9500
GlockApps + MailReach + manual	4200
Boutique consulting retainer	9000
Blue Spirit 30-day emergency	1500
Blue Spirit 90-day structured	3500

Do nothing: 90 days of continued ~30% inbox placement on a B2B program with €200K monthly pipeline impact. DIY: 30 hours/week of engineer time at €90/hour for 4 weeks = €10,800; conservatively rounded down because some teams have spare capacity. GlockApps + MailReach + manual: tooling subscriptions plus team time for 90 days. Boutique consulting retainer: €3,000/month × 3 months for senior US/UK retainer. Blue Spirit prices are fixed-scope deliverables. The chart undersells the do-nothing cost because it does not include opportunity cost from missed customer communications, missed sales follow-ups, or churn from broken transactional emails.

The key insight is that the "do nothing" path is not free — it is usually the most expensive option. Most teams never quantify it because the loss is invisible (you do not see the email that did not get opened, or the customer who did not get the password reset). Recovery work pays for itself within the engagement window when the underlying program has any meaningful B2B pipeline value. Below 5K monthly emails or for programs without measurable revenue impact, the math is different — the audit may be the right product instead.

When recovery will not work — the honest version

We turn down 1 in 4 prospective recovery clients on the diagnostic call because the case is unrecoverable. We tell them, and we tell them what to do instead. Three patterns where the answer is "do not pay for recovery, migrate to a new domain":

Multi-year domain blacklist with continuous bad signals. Domain has been on Spamhaus SBL or Gmail's domain reputation Low for over six months, and during those months the bad behaviour did not stop (continued sending to bad lists, continued ignoring complaints). The reputation profile is permanent at this point. Recovery would require not sending for 6-12 months, and even then there is no guarantee the slate clears. Migration is faster and cheaper.

Compromised domain used for phishing or fraud. If your domain was used in a documented phishing or fraud campaign — even one not authored by you, like a security breach where attackers sent phishing through your DKIM — the reputation damage is structural. ISPs do not forgive this kind of signal. Migration with disclosure to receivers is the path.

Repeated compliance violations. If you have been suspended by SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, or similar in succession, the pattern that caused the suspensions will recreate the problem on a new clean domain too. Recovery without changing the underlying practice is wasted money. The conversation we need is about practice, not technology.

If any of these describes your situation, the call is still worth having — we will tell you that, and walk you through what migration looks like.

Three real recovery cases — anonymised, representative

Case 1 — DTC e-commerce after a list purchase incident. Brand had been running healthy email program for 4 years, opened 25-30%, conversion solid. Marketing manager bought a "supplemental list" from a vendor in Q3 to boost holiday-season subscriber count. Within 2 weeks, complaint rate spiked 0.6%, Gmail Postmaster Tools showed reputation Low, opens cratered to 8%. Engaged us for 30-day emergency. We immediately purged the purchased segment, identified bounce-cluster signatures and quarantined affected list slices, ran active warm-up on engagement core (their actual customers), tightened DMARC from p=none to p=quarantine. Day 21 placement was 68%; day 30 was 76%. Retainer continued for 4 months while reputation stabilised. Total cost: €1,500 + €4,800 retainer (4 months) = €6,300. Holiday season was salvaged.

Case 2 — B2B SaaS after a DKIM rotation accident. SRE rotated DKIM keys and forgot to update one of three sending services. For 6 weeks, emails from that service signed with an invalid key landed in Gmail spam silently — Postmaster Tools reputation went from High to Medium without anyone noticing because the headline open rate aggregate stayed close to normal. Eventually a customer complained "your invoice emails go to spam", investigation revealed the issue. Engaged us for 30-day emergency. Diagnosis took 4 hours: the DKIM mismatch was visible immediately. Fix took 30 minutes. The remaining 30 days were rebuilding reputation through warm-up and monitoring. Day 30 reputation was back to High. Total cost: €1,500. The lesson the team kept: a single SPF record, a single DKIM rotation, and an automated alert when DMARC alignment rate drops would have prevented the incident — that is part of the deliverable runbook we left them.

Case 3 — Cold-email agency where 18 client domains needed parallel rebuild. Agency was running cold outreach on 18 client domains through a shared-pool managed ESP. The ESP suspended the entire pool after one client's bad list triggered a spam-trap cluster. All 18 clients suddenly had no working sending infrastructure. Engaged us for 90-day structured. We migrated each client to dedicated IPs on our PowerMTA infrastructure (separated by client to prevent contamination), warmed each domain in parallel, ran content audits, set up per-client monitoring dashboards. Day 90 placement: 16 of 18 clients above 80% inbox; 2 unrecoverable cases migrated to new domains as part of scope. Total cost: €3,500 (single 90-day engagement, not per-client) + €1,200/month retainer ongoing. The agency kept all 18 clients.

Recovery packages

One-off engagements with fixed scope and pricing. Retainer available only after a successful recovery.

Recovery 30-day emergency

From

€ 1500 / engagement

Setup: One-off · 30 days

Triage call within 24h of engagement (we know your domain is bleeding)
Full deliverability diagnosis with root-cause identification
Active warm-up of 1 sending domain across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud
Daily inbox placement testing and tuning
Bounce list cleaning and suppression sync
DMARC aggregate report parsing throughout engagement
Hands-on DNS fixes (SPF flatten, DKIM rotation, DMARC tightening)
Direct Telegram/Slack with deliverability engineer
Target: measurable inbox lift within 3 weeks for recoverable cases

Request a quote

Most chosen

Recovery 90-day structured

From

€ 3500 / engagement

Setup: One-off · 90 days

Everything in 30-day emergency
Up to 3 sending domains rebuilt in parallel
Engagement core construction — segment your active subscribers, send to them first
Gradual list re-engagement plan with sunset policy for dead contacts
IP migration if needed (provision clean IPs, parallel warm-up, traffic shift)
Content audit pass — subject lines, link reputation, image-to-text ratio
Weekly written progress report with placement metrics by ISP
Bi-weekly 30-minute review calls
Target: full recovery to 80%+ inbox placement for moderate damage cases

Request a quote

Ongoing

Recovery Retainer

From

€ 1200 /month

Setup: Monthly

After active recovery — keep the gains
Continuous warm-up engine running across your sending domains
Monthly deliverability health report with trend analysis
Real-time blacklist monitoring with same-day remediation
On-demand IP swap and warm-up when reputation incidents hit
Quarterly strategic review — what changed, what to adjust
Direct line to engineering when something breaks
Available only after a successful 30-day or 90-day recovery engagement

Request a quote

Recovery service — frequently asked

How is this different from the deliverability audit?

The audit is diagnosis. You get a written report explaining what is broken and a roadmap of what to fix. The recovery service is the fix — hands-on engineers actively rebuilding your reputation, doing the warm-up, cleaning the list, rotating DKIM, migrating IPs if needed. Audit answers "why are my emails in spam"; recovery answers "get my emails out of spam". Many clients buy the audit first, then move to recovery if the diagnosis warrants it. Some skip straight to recovery when the symptoms are obvious (sudden cliff in placement after a known bad event).

Can every domain be recovered?

Honest answer: no. Domains that have been blacklisted at the major ISP level (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo) for over six months with continuous bad signals can become effectively unrecoverable — the reputation profile is permanent, and the only path is to retire the domain and start fresh. We tell you upfront if your case looks unrecoverable. The recoverable cases are: domains with sudden reputation drops (a single bad campaign, a list-purchase incident, a security breach), domains in slow decline (caught early, before structural damage), domains with technical problems masquerading as reputation problems (DKIM rotation broke, MTA-STS misconfigured, PTR not aligned). For these, recovery has a high success rate.

What does the 30-day emergency package actually include?

Same-day or next-day triage call. Within the first week we run full diagnosis, identify root cause, lock in DNS fixes (SPF flatten if at limit, DKIM rotation, DMARC tightening), and start the warm-up engine. Daily monitoring of inbox placement across major ISPs. Bounce list cleaning and suppression sync. Continuous DMARC aggregate report parsing. Direct chat channel with the engineer assigned. Target outcome: measurable inbox placement lift within 21 days for recoverable cases. €1,500 fixed price, scope locked at one sending domain.

When do I need the 90-day structured package?

When the damage is moderate to severe and the operational complexity exceeds a single domain quick-fix. Typical scenarios: 3+ sending domains affected, IP pool needs migration to clean ranges, list contains a substantial dead-weight segment that needs sunset policy, content audit needed because old templates are flagged, organisation needs a written quarterly recovery plan to present internally. Includes everything in 30-day emergency plus engagement core construction, gradual list re-engagement, IP migration if needed, content audit, weekly written reports, bi-weekly review calls. €3,500 fixed price, up to 3 sending domains.

What is the retainer for?

Reputation maintenance after active recovery. Once you have rebuilt your sender profile, the ongoing job is to not lose it. The retainer keeps a continuous warm-up engine running, monitors blacklists in real time, parses DMARC aggregates, and handles incidents as they appear. Available only to clients who completed a 30-day or 90-day recovery engagement first — we do not sell retainer as a stand-alone product because if your reputation is healthy, you do not need it (Postmaster Tools and basic monitoring suffice). €1,200/month with monthly cancellation.

How do you measure success?

Three metrics, tracked from day one. First, inbox placement rate by ISP (Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, iCloud) measured against a private seed pool — we want to see this trending up week over week. Second, Google Postmaster Tools metrics (domain reputation, IP reputation, spam rate, authentication rate) — these reflect Gmail-specific recovery. Third, the operational signals you actually care about — open rates, reply rates, conversion rates from your real campaigns. We document the starting baseline on day one and report against it weekly.

How long do delisting requests typically take?

Varies by blacklist. Spamhaus (SBL, DBL, CSS) usually clears within 24-72 hours after you submit a delisting request — provided you have actually fixed the root cause. Microsoft (SNDS reputation reset, Outlook delisting) typically resolves in 24-48 hours through the Smart Network Data Services portal. Barracuda Reputation Block List clears within 12-24 hours. SORBS is slower — 1-3 weeks depending on which sub-zone. UCEPROTECT-L1 is fast (24-72h); UCEPROTECT-L2 and L3 we usually do not bother with because no major receiver actually consults them. The hard truth: delisting without remediation just gets you re-listed within days. Spamhaus explicitly warns about this. We never request delisting until the root cause is fixed and we can demonstrate it.

What if my domain reputation does not recover within the engagement window?

It depends on the case. For 30-day engagements where we believed the case was recoverable but it turned out worse than diagnosed, we offer two options: extend at a discounted rate (€1,000 for additional 30 days) or refund 50% of the original engagement. For 90-day engagements, we usually catch the "this is unrecoverable" reality within the first 2 weeks and pivot to "build a new domain in parallel and migrate" — that is part of the engagement scope and does not add to cost. We do not promise recovery; we promise honest effort with documented outcomes.

Can you recover from a Gmail-specific suspension?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. Gmail-specific reputation tanking responds to engagement-core warm-up and DMARC tightening reasonably well — we have recovered Gmail placement for clients in 4-8 weeks. Gmail outright domain blacklist (where mail is rejected with 5xx codes specifically citing reputation) is harder; the Gmail postmaster team requires explicit appeal documentation and even then often refuses. If you have hit Gmail blacklist proper, we tell you upfront that the realistic path is domain migration, not recovery. The diagnostic call clarifies which case you are in.

Do you handle the migration if we need to retire the broken domain?

Yes. If the diagnostic concludes the domain is structurally unrecoverable, we transition the engagement to a domain migration: provision clean replacement domains (3-5 typical for redundancy), full DNS and authentication setup, IP warm-up, gradual traffic shift from old domain to new, and supervised retirement of the broken domain. This work is part of the 90-day structured package; for 30-day packages, the migration adds 2-4 weeks and €800-1,500 depending on scope. Cleaner than continuing to fight a lost battle.

Can Blue Spirit provide the new IPs and infrastructure if needed?

Yes. We operate dedicated IP pools across multiple datacenters with documented clean reputation history. If recovery requires fresh IPs (because yours are too damaged), we provision them as part of the engagement and warm them in parallel with your existing infrastructure. Optionally we can take over the entire MTA layer (PowerMTA or KumoMTA managed) post-recovery — that is a separate ongoing service, not part of the recovery price. Many clients use the recovery as the bridge to migrate from a problematic ESP or shared-IP cloud service to a clean self-hosted setup.

What is the difference between IP reputation recovery and domain reputation recovery?

IP reputation recovers in 2-4 weeks with consistent clean sending behavior. Domain reputation is much stickier — typically 6-12 weeks. This matters operationally: switching ESPs (which gives you new IPs) does not magically fix deliverability if your domain reputation is the problem, because Gmail and Microsoft both weight domain reputation more heavily than IP reputation in 2026. We diagnose which one is broken on day one. If your domain reputation is intact and your IPs are the issue, recovery is faster and we may recommend an IP-only migration. If your domain reputation is damaged, the work is longer and we prioritize engagement-core warm-up to rebuild domain trust.

Reputation broken? Tell us what happened.

The 30-minute triage call is free. We tell you whether your case is recoverable, what package fits, and what the realistic outcome looks like. No magic, no promises, just honest engineering.

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