Sending protections and verification

Every pplCRM newsletter leaves through a shared sending infrastructure, so one bad sender can hurt everyone’s deliverability. These protections keep spammers out — and for a legitimate organization they cost a few minutes, once.

Before your first send

1. 1Verify your sending domainUnder Workspace → Domains, add the domain you send from. You’ll get a checklist of 4 required DNS records to add at your domain provider (GoDaddy, Namecheap, Cloudflare, and similar); use the copy buttons so nothing gets mistyped, then select Check DNS records. Changes usually appear within minutes but can take up to 48 hours. A fifth record, DMARC, is recommended but optional; it never blocks verification. One of the four — branded links — defaults to email.yourdomain; if that name is already in use on your domain, select use a different name on that record and pick another (links and go are common). Once verified, set a default From address on that domain under Workspace → Communications. Mail authenticated with your own domain lands in inboxes; unauthenticated mail lands in spam.
2. 2Verify a mobile numberUnder Workspace → Communications → Sending phone verification, enter a mobile number and confirm the 6-digit SMS code. One number per workspace, one time — required on every plan, because the sending reputation you share is shared by paying workspaces too.

The Free-plan warm-up

For the first 7 days, a Free workspace can send up to 100 newsletter emails per day. If a send is larger than the day’s remaining allowance, you’ll be told before anything goes out — narrow the audience or wait a day. After the first week the normal plan limits apply.

The monthly email allowance

Every plan includes a monthly newsletter-email allowance tied to its subscriber bracket: 2× your subscriber cap on Free, 8× on Grassroots, and 12× on Movement — enough for a weekly newsletter with plenty of room to spare. The composer’s Review & send step shows exactly how much remains, and a send larger than the remainder is declined with the numbers and the reset date rather than partially sent. Emails sent by automations count toward the same allowance and limits. The allowance resets every billing month, and because growing your list moves you up a bracket automatically, it grows with your audience — see Plans and billing.

The Free-plan subscriber limit

The Free plan includes up to 1,000 emailable subscribers, and the limit is enforced at send time: while your workspace has more than 1,000 emailable subscribers, newsletter sends are blocked — the composer says so on Review & send instead of surprising you with an error. Nothing is deleted: your contacts all stay, and the block lifts the moment your emailable list is back at 1,000 or fewer (remove email addresses or mark people Do not contact) or you upgrade. Only *emailable* people count — contacts without an email address, do-not-contact records and suppressed addresses don’t.

The content check before every send

Every send must also clear the deliverability check: a 0–100 score built from content best practices, an optional spam-filter score, and an AI review that catches scam-like patterns and content outside the acceptable-use policy. pplCRM sending is for community, political and nonprofit updates — fundraising appeals, auctions and event promotion included; unrelated commercial product blasts are not. Scores below 50 block the send on every plan; 50–79 sends with a warning. The AI review runs on every check — the ones you run while drafting and the automatic check on every send. It reads only the newsletter content itself and is processed by Anthropic (listed with our other service providers in the privacy policy). See Get your newsletters delivered.

Automatic pauses

• If a send’s hard-bounce rate passes 5%, sending is paused automatically — a bounce rate that high almost always means the list contains addresses that never opted in. Even a send already in progress stops.
• If a send’s spam-complaint rate passes 1%, the account is suspended pending a human review.
• If a contact import comes back with an unusually high rate of undeliverable addresses (dead domains or disposable-email services), sending is paused pending review — the same purchased/scraped-list signal, caught before you ever hit send. Every people import checks each address’s domain and quietly suppresses the bad ones; see Import from CSV.

Plan-gated features

Some features are enforced by plan: the shared inbox (mailbox sync), forms, donations, automations, lists, volunteer management (teams and events) and API access (including Zapier) need Grassroots or higher; canvassing, deliveries and companion volunteer access need Movement. Moving to the Free plan turns these off — and synced inbox email is permanently deleted 30 days after the downgrade (see Plans and billing). See your options under Workspace → Billing.