How representative are seed accounts of real user inboxes?

Seed accounts provide useful but incomplete representation:

What seeds capture: Baseline authentication checks, content filtering, IP and domain reputation signals, provider-level filtering rules.

What seeds miss: User-level engagement history (seeds have none with your domain), personalized filtering based on past behavior, the full variation across millions of real users.

Seeds show whether you pass basic requirements. They cannot predict how engaged versus disengaged segments of your real list will experience placement.

Test accounts tell you if the harbor is open. They cannot tell you how each individual merchant will receive your goods.