Your questions about Brain, answered.

Most customers are fully onboarded within 24–48 hours. The typical flow:

1. Account setup and domain registration — 15 minutes
2. ESP integration (API key or data push) — 30 minutes
3. Postmaster + SNDS connections — 15 minutes
4. DMARC DNS record deployment if needed — up to 24 hours for propagation
5. First signals and baseline established — within the first send cycle

Your onboarding contact walks you through each step. Command plans include a dedicated onboarding session.

No. Brain connects to your existing sending setup and watches. You don't route email through Brain, change your ESP, or modify your sending infrastructure.

Brain reads performance data from your integrations (ESP metrics, Postmaster, SNDS, DMARC reports) and works in the background.

Signal data starts populating within hours of your first integration being connected. Speed depends on the source:

• ESP metrics: Near real-time (minutes after sends)
• Google Postmaster: Within a few hours of your first send after integration
• Microsoft SNDS: Updated daily by Microsoft; Brain reflects within 24 hours
• DMARC aggregate reports: Received daily from receiving providers
• Blacklist checks: Continuous, results immediate

Most customers see meaningful signals within 12–24 hours of completing setup.

Yes. Every account starts with a free 30-day trial with full access. No credit card required.

Brain integrates with major ESPs including SendGrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, Postmark, SparkPost, Klaviyo, Mailchimp, and Brevo via API. Custom integrations are available on Brain and Command tiers.

If your ESP isn't on the standard list, contact us — we support custom data ingestion via our API for any provider that exposes campaign and delivery metrics.

Brain connects to your Postmaster account via OAuth — no credentials shared. Once authorised:

1. Go to your Brain dashboard and click Postmaster integration.
2. A browser prompt asks you to select your Google account.
3. Click Allow to grant read-only access.
4. Brain begins pulling your domain reputation, spam rate, delivery error, and IP reputation data from Postmaster automatically.

Brain only requests read-only access — it can't change anything in your Google account or Postmaster setup.

Microsoft SNDS provides an automated data URL unique to your account. To connect:

1. Log in to SNDS and copy your automated data URL.
2. In Brain, go to SNDS integration and paste the URL.
3. Brain verifies the connection and begins watching your IP reputation, trap hit rates, and complaint data from Microsoft's network.

SNDS data is updated daily by Microsoft. Brain reflects changes within 24 hours.

What Brain does with DMARC:

• Generates a DMARC record for your domain if you don't have one
• Verifies the record is correctly published in DNS
• Collects and analyses aggregate DMARC reports from all major receivers
• Alerts you when SPF or DKIM stops aligning, or when someone spoofs your domain
• Tracks alignment rates over time

If you're unsure where to start, set your policy to none first. Brain watches and reports without affecting delivery, so you can see your traffic before you enforce stricter policies.

Yes. The number of domains included depends on your plan — talk to us and we'll size it to your setup. Each domain gets its own signal feed, health score, incident history, and RCA reports.

DNS propagation can take from a few minutes to 24 hours depending on your DNS provider and TTL. Brain auto-checks every 15 minutes, so no manual action is needed — it confirms once the record is live.

If it's been more than 24 hours, check that:

• The record was added as a TXT record (not A, CNAME, or other)
• It's on the correct subdomain (_dmarc.yourdomain.com)
• There are no duplicate or conflicting DMARC records

If it persists, email help@inboxstack.com — we'll check the DNS lookup directly.

We don't publish pricing. Every account starts with a free 30-day trial — full access, no credit card. When the trial ends, we put together a plan sized to your sending volume, ESP connectors, and domains. Talk to us →

Yes. Upgrade any time — change takes effect immediately and is prorated. Downgrades apply at the end of your current billing cycle. No cancellation fees.

No setup fee, no long-term contract. All plans bill monthly and can be cancelled any time. Annual billing is also available.

You'll see a notification when you approach the limit. Brain keeps watching your existing domains — you simply can't add new ones until you upgrade or stack an Extra Domain Pack add-on. We never stop watching a domain without warning.

RCA is the part of Brain that answers "why". When your inbox rate drops or a bounce spike hits, Brain doesn't just raise an alert. It investigates what changed.

The RCA Inspector:

• Lines up the signals across your sending history, content, SPF/DKIM/DMARC results, and your domain's health
• Runs them through the diagnosis engine to work out which event set off the others
• Names the primary cause (e.g. "SPF misalignment on subdomain X pushed your Gmail domain score down") and separates it from contributing factors
• Writes a plain-language narrative explaining what happened and why
• Recommends a prioritised resolution plan

The narrative is written for any team to understand, not just specialists.

Brain watches 15+ signal categories around the clock:

• Gmail inbox placement, domain reputation, spam rate
• Microsoft inbox performance, SNDS IP reputation, trap hits
• Yahoo inbox performance, complaint rate, delivery errors
• Hard and soft bounce rates, feedback-loop complaints
• Negative engagement (low open rates, high unsubscribes)
• Subject-line patterns that spam filters flag
• Content link analysis (malicious or flagged domains)
• DNS record health (SPF, DKIM, DMARC, MX, PTR)
• Blacklist presence across 30+ major lists
• DMARC aggregate report anomalies and SPF/DKIM failures

Brain compares every signal against your own history. Even a small deviation triggers an early warning: a Gmail domain score that hasn't dropped yet but is trending down, or a minor uptick in complaints before it crosses the threshold.

The Radar Monitor gives you a live risk view across all your domains, so you act before a small slip turns into a week of email in spam.

The Incident Board is a live view of every active and resolved incident across your domains: spam-folder drops, bounce spikes, blocklist hits, DMARC failures. Each incident includes:

• Severity level (critical, high, medium, low)
• Affected domain and signal type
• Timeline of when the issue started and how it progressed
• Link to the full RCA report with the cause and resolution steps
• Current status (open, in progress, resolved)

It replaces ad-hoc Slack messages and spreadsheet tracking — everything in one place with full context.

The War Room is a command-centre view for high-severity incidents or major send campaigns. It gives your team a single screen with live signal feeds, active incident status, and RCA progress, all updating in real time so everyone is looking at the same data during a crisis.

No subscriber data is ever collected. Brain doesn't access your mailing lists, subscriber profiles, email addresses, or the content of individual emails sent to recipients.

What Brain does collect:

• Performance metrics — delivery, bounce, open rates (aggregated, not per-subscriber)
• SPF, DKIM and DMARC results — pass, fail and alignment per send
• Campaign-level metadata — subject lines, send volumes, send times
• Domain and IP health data — Postmaster, SNDS, blacklist APIs

No PII. No subscriber lists. Ever.

All data is encrypted in transit (TLS 1.2+) and at rest. Brain's infrastructure runs on ISO 27001-compliant Google Cloud regions. Customer data is logically isolated per account — no cross-customer access is possible.

For Custom-tier customers with specific data-residency requirements, regional deployment options are available.

No. Brain only needs read-only API access to your ESP's reporting and analytics endpoints. It can't send emails, modify lists, or change settings. We recommend creating a dedicated read-only API key for Brain — your security team can audit and revoke it independently.

This is exactly what Brain is built for. When Gmail, Outlook, or Yahoo starts routing your mail to spam, Brain:

1. Sees the placement drop in the signal feed
2. Opens an incident and starts RCA automatically
3. Cross-references your recent sends, content, SPF/DKIM/DMARC results, and domain-score changes to find what changed
4. Names the most likely cause (a new sending IP without warm-up, a broken DKIM key, a content pattern, a spike in unsubscribes)
5. Gives you a step-by-step resolution plan

You get this in minutes, not hours of manual investigation.

Brain checks your domains and IPs against 30+ blacklists continuously. When a listing is detected:

• Immediate alert with the specific blacklist, listed entity, and the listing reason if available
• RCA investigates likely causes (spam complaints, sending to invalid addresses, SPF or DKIM failures)
• Brain provides delisting instructions for each blacklist, including the direct submission URL where available

For persistent or recurring listings, the Pattern Library shows whether similar issues have occurred before, so you can see what keeps causing it.

Brain tracks hard and soft bounce rates as dedicated signals and flags anything outside your normal range. A rising bounce rate opens an incident. The RCA distinguishes between:

• List hygiene issues: high hard bounces suggesting stale or purchased lists
• Provider blocks: soft bounces from Gmail or Microsoft blocking your IP or domain
• DMARC rejections: bounces caused by a reject policy on unaligned mail
• Rate limiting: temporary deferrals from providers being sent to too fast

Each diagnosis comes with specific remediation steps.

Yes. The Command tier ($349/mo) is built for this. You organise domains by client within a single account, with separate signal feeds, incident histories, and health reports per client. Each client's data is isolated so you can manage and report on them independently.

Custom alert routing lets you receive notifications per-client or aggregate them — your choice.

On Command, you can export domain health reports and RCA summaries as PDFs. White-label reporting (with your agency branding) is included. Client portal access is in beta — speak to our team about early access.

• Free / Radar: Email support, response within 48 business hours
• Brain: Priority email support, response within 24 business hours
• Command: Priority support with a quarterly check-in call
• Priority Phone Support add-on (+$300/mo): Direct line + 4-hour response SLA from a senior engineer who has run email at scale

All plans can reach us at help@inboxstack.com.

Yes. Brain is built for any email team, whatever its technical depth. RCA narratives are written in plain language; resolution plans are step-by-step. You don't need to know what a Postmaster spam-rate threshold means — Brain tells you whether yours is a problem and what to do about it.

We also offer onboarding sessions and knowledge-base articles to help your team get the most out of Brain.

Email help@inboxstack.com or call +91 88602 49616 during business hours (Mon–Fri, 10am–10pm IST). For billing or account changes, use the same email and include your account domain in the subject line for fastest routing.