Why website email reliability matters

When a client tells me their email numbers dropped, I don’t tell them to send more. I don’t tell them to rewrite the email. Or test another subject line. Or keep sending just because it’s already scheduled. I tell them to pause. Not because email is bad. But because inbox providers are paying attention. When opens or clicks drop suddenly, the first question isn’t “Is the content worse?” It’s: Can inbox providers reliably confirm who this email is coming from? Because inbox providers don’t evaluate effort. They evaluate trust. Every email sent while trust is unclear sends a signal. And if those emails aren’t being opened, that signal works against you. This is the part most people miss. Continuing to send while something underneath is broken doesn’t stabilize delivery. It teaches inbox providers to trust you less. So before my clients send the next email, we pause and check the foundation. Authentication. Identity alignment. Whether their sending behavior still matches how their domain is being trusted. Most people treat deliverability like a content problem. It’s almost always an infrastructure problem. And ignoring that difference is what turns a small dip into a months-long recovery.

"We weren’t just dealing with bad marketing metrics, we were losing users who couldn’t activate, burning budget on messages that were never seen, and watching our product stall for a reason that was completely outside the dashboard view." A few months ago, we were silently losing users, and we didn’t even realize it at first. People would sign up for Ajelix, but never activate their accounts. Transactional emails were going out, but no one saw them. Our marketing campaigns barely got opened, and we kept jumping between email platforms, hoping one of them would magically solve the issue. After almost a year of chasing shadows, we finally identified the root cause that was slowly destroying our sender reputation. And because we relied heavily on email for onboarding, transactional flows, product updates, and marketing, this one issue created a ripple effect that touched almost everything we were doing. In this week’s Building Without a Map newsletter, I shared the full breakdown of what happened: the metrics, the warning signs we missed, how we built our email validation tool, and why we decided to launch that internal solution as a separate SaaS. I also included some industry research I found while digging deeper into this topic (spoiler: software companies have the worst bounce rates across all industries), and explained why it’s not just about “getting out of spam”, it’s about making sure your product can even reach the people it was built for. If you’ve ever dealt with email deliverability issues or you're still unsure what might be holding back your campaigns, this story might give you a few answers, or at the very least, help you avoid the mistakes we made. You can read the full issue below 👇 And if you think someone in your network is silently struggling with the same thing, I’d appreciate a share.

I recently reviewed the digital posture of just over 7,000 organisations, not as a deep technical audit, but through a business lens. The findings weren’t catastrophic, but they were revealing weaknesses that could enable impersonation, fraud or disruption, inconsistent email authentication affecting invoice reliability and brand trust, web encryption issues, and exposed web components. Collectively they create cumulative business risk. This isn’t about technical acronyms, it’s about invoices reaching the right place, customer emails not landing in spam, preventing payment diversion fraud, avoiding reputational fallout, and maintaining operational resilience. The encouraging part, most improvements are low-cost and straightforward with clear expectations, better supplier conversations, simple hygiene fixes, and prioritising high-impact partners. Resilience doesn’t start with perfection, it starts with fixing the obvious. When your suppliers communicate reliably and maintain trusted platforms, you get paid faster, you win more business, your reputation strengthens. That’s not just cyber security that’s good business leadership.

I burned through $15K perfecting cold email copy. Here's what I learned when I focused on deliverability instead. While I was obsessing over subject lines and CTAs, most of my emails were landing in spam folders. I had killer copy that nobody ever saw. But here's what happened when I fixed the infrastructure piece first… I went from ignored emails to 800,000+ monthly sends at ColdIQ. If your cold emails aren't working, deliverability beats copy every single time. WHY DELIVERABILITY IS EVERYTHING: 1. Perfect copy means nothing in spam. You can have killer targeting, perfect messaging, incredible offers... but if your email lands in spam? Game over. 2. It compounds everything else. Once your domain reputation is down, even your transactional emails start getting flagged and won't get delivered anymore. So how do you make your email in the primary? 1. Protect your main domain. Never send cold emails from your primary domain. We use 70+ secondary domains to keep our brand safe and our main inbox clean. 2. Distribute volume across multiple mailboxes. Set up 140+ mailboxes across those domains. Keep it under 50 sends per day per domain. High volume too early = instant red flag. 3. Get your technical foundation bulletproof. Set up SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication. Without proper technical set-up, you're flagged as suspicious by default. 4. Warm up. Send nothing for 2 weeks. Use premium warm-up tools to build trust gradually with ESPs. Ramp slowly to avoid triggering their spam filters. Patience here pays dividends later. 5. Natural variation. Use Spintax or tools like Twain to introduce variations in your messaging. Even small variations help you avoid the repetition triggers that scream "mass email blast" to spam filters. Remember, list quality plus message still matter most. Even with perfect infrastructure, if your list is off and your message is weak, you'll still land in spam. Deliverability gets you to the inbox, but the relevance keeps you there. Monitor everything rigorously. Use tools to track your sender reputation across all ESPs. We check deliverability rates daily (it's that critical). Infrastructure gets you to the inbox, but your targeting plus messaging determines what happens next. I've put together a 7-day GTM crash course that includes our exact setup, authentication templates, and the monitoring systems we use to protect the campaigns of our 70 clients. Reply with "SETUP" if you want access before your next campaign goes live.

📧 Your email metrics might be lying to you. Ever celebrated those impressive open and click rates only to wonder why your campaigns aren't delivering the results you expected? I see this all the time. Marketers obsessing over surface-level metrics while completely missing what's actually happening behind the scenes. The real culprit? Email deliverability. But here's the thing: deliverability isn't just about whether your email was delivered. It's about WHERE it landed. Primary inbox? Promotions tab? Or worse... the spam folder? And guess what? You could have "healthy" open rates while a significant portion of your audience never sees your emails at all. The invisible problem is that most email programs suffer from deliverability issues they don't even know exist because they're looking at the wrong metrics. Why your current approach might be failing you: ✅ Domain level: Your emails might be reaching Gmail users but getting blocked by Outlook ✅ Feedback loop gaps: Without proper tools to monitor your sender reputation, you're flying blind ✅ Segmented performance: High engagement from one segment masks zero visibility with another So what should you ACTUALLY be measuring? → Inbox Placement Rate by Domain (not just overall delivery) → Open & Click Reach over time (not just per email) → Unsubscribe patterns and bounce rates → Engagement trends across your subscriber lifecycle The truth is uncomfortable but necessary: those impressive open & click rates you've been reporting? They're just the tip of the iceberg. They don't tell you if your emails are reaching everyone they should. They don't reveal if your sender reputation is tanking. And they certainly don't show you the revenue you're leaving on the table. Remember: What gets measured gets improved. But only if you're measuring what actually matters. Is it time to look beyond those vanity metrics and get serious about your email deliverability? Your revenue numbers will thank you.

I scaled my own stores to $500K/month before I ever ran an agency. When I audit a new brand's email, I know EXACTLY which numbers tell the real story Most brands jump straight into redesigning emails or rewriting subject lines I start with a baseline audit because if the foundation is broken, nothing else matters. (1) Pull your repeat purchase rate. If it's under 25%, you have a retention problem that no amount of pretty emails will fix because your customers are buying once and disappearing. (2) Check what percentage of email revenue comes from flows versus campaigns. If your flows are generating less than 15-20% of your total email revenue, your automation is broken and you're relying on manual sends that don't scale. (3) Look at your list growth rate. If you're not converting at least 5% of your website traffic into email subscribers, you're bleeding potential customers before they even enter your system. (4) Audit your deliverability setup. Branded sending domain with proper SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records. I've seen brands with great copy and great design getting crushed because their emails land in spam. (5) Review your suppression list. If you haven't cleaned it recently, unengaged subscribers are dragging down your sender reputation and making every campaign perform worse. I do this audit before I build a single flow or write a single email because the creative work means nothing if the foundation underneath it is broken.

After spending over 20 hours in the last two days troubleshooting critical email issues with Bluehost, I think it’s finally time to say it out loud: We’re done. For years, Blind Tiger Coffee Roasters’ web and email infrastructure lived on HostMonster with minimal headaches. But ever since the migration to Bluehost’s systems, it’s been one issue after another including unstable mail delivery, IP blacklisting, and support experiences that feel like déjà vu every single time. Yesterday, our entire company’s ability to send email from Outlook and mobile clients suddenly stopped. We did our homework and traced the problem to Bluehost’s mail server IP being blacklisted. We confirmed it with multiple tools and even validated the errors coming directly from Cloudmark. The root cause was clear. This couldn’t have come at a worse time. The holidays are the busiest season of the year. Customers are placing orders for coffee and merchandise. Wholesale partners are reaching out. Vendors, collaborators, and event partners rely on us to respond quickly. And we can’t. Because our business email simply stopped working. Yet every time we reach out to support, we're asked to repeat the same basic troubleshooting steps that have already been performed. Steps that have nothing to do with the actual issue. Four support reps later, we're still being walked through the same script, still being told to “try again,” and still nowhere closer to a solution. Meanwhile, my team is stuck without reliable email. My time, which should be spent running a growing business, is being drained by chasing circles. And the hosting provider we trusted for years can’t escalate a clear network-level problem. At this point, I have no confidence left. If anyone has a solid recommendation for a reliable hosting and email provider who understands the needs of a business operating at scale, especially one that can offer stable infrastructure and meaningful support, I'M ALL EARS. This is no longer sustainable. Blind Tiger Coffee Roasters is officially looking for a new home for our web assets. Patrick Halbig Wesley Pua Ashlee Stock I think it is time to give Shopify a serious consideration. This could not have come at the absolute worse time: The busiest holiday season yet for our small business. #webhosting #workemail #blacklisted #tampabay #emailserver #bluehost #shopify https://lnkd.in/e_-KAz6N

Many claim email deliverability is about engagement. But it's not. You can apply all the best sending practices, but if a threat actor sends 10x your regular volume in phishing emails from your accounts, whether through hijacked credentials or because DMARC is sitting at p=none - none of those practices actually matter. If there's no security foundation in place and your domain & associated IPs end up on Spamhaus, SURBL, etc, your emails won't make it through. Foundation first, surface-level stuff later. DKIM, SPF, and DMARC are a great starting point, but first ensure #DMARC is at p=reject, DNS records are locked, MFA is enabled, and API keys are rotated and monitored. Security isn't a deliverability add-on. It's the engine. Nobody builds a car by starting with the body. You do the internal work first, then put the shell on top. #EmailDeliverability #EmailSecurity

The Email secret 90% of Marketers miss: And It’s Not Just About Open Rates! I once helped a client discover that 30% of their “engaged” email list was full of dead ends. This was also affecting conversions and revenue. The culprit? Bounces. But not all bounces are created equal—and ignoring the difference could tank your sender reputation. Here’s the breakdown: 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁 𝗕𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 “𝗠𝗮𝘆𝗯𝗲” 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗲): Temporary delivery failures. Causes: Full inboxes, server outages, or temporary blocklisting. Fix: Wait it out. If it happens 3 times in a short span, remove the address. 𝗛𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗕𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗰𝗲𝘀 (𝗧𝗵𝗲 “𝗡𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿” 𝗭𝗼𝗻𝗲): Permanent failures. Causes: Invalid addresses (typos like “gmial.com”), abandoned accounts, or catch-all inboxes that silently swallow (catch-all status) emails, even after you verified the list. Fix: Remove these immediately. Sending to them repeatedly flags you as spam. 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗧𝗵𝗶𝘀 𝗠𝗮𝘁𝘁𝗲𝗿𝘀: Clean lists = higher engagement = better ROI. ISPs track bounce rates to decide if you’re a spammer. Weekly list audits prevent deliverability disasters. 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝘀𝗵𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝗯𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗻? - Ask your email service provider how they handle bounces (do they auto-retry soft ones?). - Scrub hard bounces after the first failure. - Monitor soft bounces like a hawk—3 strikes, they’re out. - Test-drive solutions like EmailAddress.ai to pre-verify addresses and avoid guessing which emails are valid, catch-alls, or outright spam traps. As someone who’s spent 20+ years in B2B data industry, I’ve seen companies lose deals because their “perfect” email list wasn't perfect after all. Tools that separate real leads from dead ends turn your data into a revenue engine—not a liability. Seeing bounce issues as well? DM me for a chat! #EmailMarketing #B2BData #LeadGeneration #GTMStrategy

What if Email Deliverability didn’t matter? No spam filters. No inbox placement challenges. Sounds ideal, right? But would it be? Think again. Without deliverability standards, inbox providers would have to fight back even harder against abuse. Stricter Blocking - more aggressive filtering to keep out bad actors. Delayed Deliveries - emails stuck in limbo while systems analyze content. Deep Content Scanning - increased scrutiny on every message, possibly even compromising privacy. The reality? Deliverability exists to protect the inbox... ...and brands that follow best practices will always have the upper hand. High deliverability = high trust = high engagement. Takeaway: If you’re not prioritizing email reputation, authentication, and engagement, you’re already falling behind. Deliverability isn’t a barrier - it’s your competitive advantage.