Sistava

Protect Your Email Reputation

Every email your AI employees send, whether it is a notification, a mailbox reply, or an outbound message, passes through a pre-send check before it leaves. Sistava validates the address, checks it against a suppression list built from past bounces and complaints, and blocks anything that would hurt your sending reputation. You do not configure this: it runs silently on every send so your domain keeps a clean track record with inbox providers.

When you hire an AI employee that sends email, whether that is a personal mailbox address, a scheduled report, or a reply in a thread, you are trusting Sistava's infrastructure to send from the same shared sending domain as every other tenant. One bad address, one ignored bounce, or one address that keeps failing can quietly drag down deliverability for everyone, including you.

Sistava runs every outbound email through a pre-send gate first: it checks the address is syntactically valid, confirms the domain can actually receive mail, and rejects disposable addresses outright. If that address bounced before or was reported as spam, it is on a suppression list and the send is skipped, silently, before it ever reaches a mail server. Bounces and complaints coming back from the provider feed that suppression list automatically, so an address that fails once does not get retried into a hard bounce, and an address that keeps failing gets suppressed for good.

The part that is easy to miss from the outside is what happens when the check itself is having a bad day. If the DNS lookup used to confirm a domain can receive mail times out, or the suppression database is briefly unreachable, Sistava does not block the send waiting for a system to recover. It lets the message through and logs what happened. A deliverability system that fails closed would mean your employee cannot send a routine reply because a background health check hiccuped somewhere; this one is built so a temporary outage on our side never becomes a business interruption on yours.

What Gets Checked Before Every Send

Every outbound email, regardless of which employee or feature triggered it, passes through the same validation before it is handed to the mail provider. The address format has to be valid, the domain cannot be a known disposable-email provider, and, where possible, the domain's mail servers are confirmed to exist. Addresses that already appear on the suppression list, because they bounced or complained before, are skipped rather than retried.

This check happens once, centrally, rather than being reimplemented per feature. Whether the email is a signup confirmation, a scheduled notification, or an AI employee replying from its personal mailbox address, it goes through the same gate. That consistency is what keeps a single weak spot, like a form that skipped validation, from becoming the thing that damages deliverability for the rest of the platform.

How Bounces Turn Into Protection

When a mail provider reports that a message did not arrive, that report is classified and recorded. Soft bounces, like a full mailbox or a temporary server issue, get one strike before anything is suppressed, because a temporary problem is not evidence the address is bad. Hard bounces, meaning the address or domain does not exist, and spam complaints suppress the address immediately.

Every suppression is written with the reason and the raw provider response kept for a record, and a more severe reason is never quietly downgraded to a softer one later. That record exists so a suppression can be explained and audited after the fact, not just applied silently and forgotten.

How It Works

A pre-send gate and a bounce-fed suppression list run on every outbound email

Before any message leaves, the recipient address goes through the same sequence every time: format check, disposable-domain check, a live check that the domain's mail servers actually exist, then a lookup against the suppression list. The first failure stops the send. Rejections are worded the same generic way regardless of the actual reason, so nobody scanning your signup form or contact page can tell a suppressed address from a mistyped one.

After a message is sent, bounce and complaint notifications reported back by the mail provider are read and turned into suppression entries. A single mailbox-full bounce does not suppress an address outright; the system tracks it and only suppresses after a repeat failure, so one-off delivery problems do not permanently block a real customer. A spam complaint suppresses immediately, no second chance, because that signal is unambiguous and protects your domain the most.

Use Cases

AI employees sending mail from their own mailbox address

Every AI employee with a personal mailbox address sends replies and outbound messages through the same pre-send gate, so a bad address it picks up from a conversation or a task never becomes a bounce that damages the shared sending domain.

Scheduled notifications and reports

Recurring emails, like scheduled reports or task notifications, get checked against the same suppression list every time they go out, so an address that stopped being valid months ago does not keep getting mailed on a loop.

Protecting the whole platform's sending reputation

Because every tenant sends from shared infrastructure, one organization's bad addresses can affect deliverability for everyone. The suppression list and bounce handling exist to keep that blast radius contained without any organization having to manage it themselves.

FAQ

Do I need to turn this on or configure anything?

No. Deliverability protection runs automatically on every outbound email the platform sends, including messages your AI employees send through their mailbox address. There is no toggle to find and nothing to set up.

Will a real customer's email ever get silently blocked forever?

A single delivery problem, like a full mailbox, does not suppress an address on the first failure; the platform tracks it and only suppresses after a repeat bounce. A hard bounce or spam complaint does suppress immediately, since those are strong signals the address should not be mailed again.

What happens if the validation system itself has an outage?

Sends are allowed through rather than blocked. If the check that confirms a domain can receive mail times out or fails for an infrastructure reason, the message still goes out. The design deliberately favors letting a message through over blocking a legitimate send because of a temporary check failure.

Can I see which addresses were suppressed and why?

Suppression decisions are recorded with a reason and the underlying provider response, so the history is auditable internally. This is a protection layer for sender reputation rather than a reporting tool you interact with directly today.

Where Protect Your Email Reputation fits

Protect Your Email Reputation is part of What stops them from going wrong.

Your AI agents pause before any sensitive action and wait for your approval. PII is detected and redacted before it reaches the model. Content policies block harmful or off-brand output. Execution limits prevent runaway tasks. A Sistava mentor pairs with every employee to spot blockers and keep work on track alongside their team leader. Set company-wide policies once and every employee follows them, including future hires.

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