The Company

Just Russel delivers personalized dog and cat food to pet owners across Belgium. As a fast-growing D2C brand, email drives their business: order confirmations, delivery updates, promotions, and win-back campaigns.

With tens of thousands of emails going out daily, deliverability isn't optional. It's revenue.

The Challenge

Monday evening. January 19, 2026. The office is empty.

Somewhere in the email infrastructure, something breaks. Emails to Microsoft recipients (Outlook, Hotmail, Live) start bouncing. Hard.

In a traditional setup, this goes unnoticed until someone checks the dashboards the next day. Maybe later in the week, when the weekly report comes in. By then, thousands of customers have missed their emails. Revenue is lost. Reputation damage compounds.

But Just Russel had Engagor watching.

The Discovery

9:56 PM, Engagor's Autonomous AI detects a critical anomaly:

The numbers told a clear story:

• 10.21% bounce rate to Microsoft (vs. 0.07% to Gmail)
• 37% of total volume affected, more than 1 in 3 emails
• 26× worse performance compared to other mailbox providers

This wasn't a gradual decline. This was a cliff.

The Diagnosis

Traditional monitoring would show "bounce rate up" and leave you guessing. Engagor went deeper, automatically analyzing SMTP response codes to find the root cause:

This wasn't a content problem. It wasn't an engagement problem. It was infrastructure, and completely outside Just Russel's control.

What the ESP Recommended

Meanwhile, the ESP's dashboard offered its own advice:

This is the standard playbook. When deliverability drops, most platforms default to engagement-based recommendations: send less, send to openers only, warm up your list.

The IP was blocklisted. No amount of "targeting engaged subscribers" would fix that. A customer following this advice would be optimizing for the wrong problem entirely, while the real issue continued to damage their sender reputation.

This is the difference between generic, templated recommendations and actual root cause analysis.

Instant Answers When It Mattered

When Chief Growth Officer Louis Vanderhaeghen saw the discovery, his first question was immediate: "How much of our traffic is actually going to Microsoft?"

Instead of digging through dashboards, filtering reports, or waiting for someone to pull the data, he simply asked Engagor's AI Studio in plain language:

No SQL queries. No exports. No waiting. Just a question and an answer.

The ESP Response

A support ticket was escalated with the exact technical details Engagor had identified.

The next morning, the ESP replied:

The error code indicated a hard block, not a temporary deferral. And no other senders on different IPs were experiencing the same issue.

Armed with Engagor's specific diagnosis (the exact IP, exact error code, exact timestamp), Just Russel was able to push back with evidence and escalate appropriately.

The Outcome

With the real problem identified in minutes rather than days, Just Russel could:

• Escalate with concrete technical evidence
• Challenge generic "industry-wide" explanations
• Begin planning a move to dedicated IP infrastructure
• Minimize the window of reputation damage

Why It Matters