Email Deliverability

Email deliverability is whether your message reaches the inbox at all. Sending is the easy part. Landing in the inbox instead of the spam folder is the hard part, and nothing tells you when you have failed. The message leaves, your report says delivered, and the customer never sees it.

The receiving mail server asks two questions. Did this really come from who it claims, and do people complain about them? Three small records answer the first, and they live in your domain settings rather than on your website. SPF is a door list, naming the servers allowed to send mail under your name. DKIM adds an invisible signature to every message, which the receiver checks against a key you publish, proving nothing was changed on the way. DMARC is your instruction about what to do when a message fails those checks, and it also mails you a weekly report of who is sending in your name.

The second question is about behaviour, and it is where most senders lose. A young domain that suddenly posts four thousand messages looks like trouble. A bought list is worse, because a tenth of those addresses no longer exist and every bounce counts against you. Since 2024, Gmail and Yahoo also want a one-click unsubscribe in bulk mail and complaints kept under three in every thousand. Three in a thousand is a very small number.

Here is the part that catches companies out. Invoices, password resets and order confirmations usually leave from your own application server, not from the marketing tool, so they carry a separate reputation. The newsletter arrives and the receipt does not. Check it today from an address outside your company, and check the spam folder before you decide it worked.

Those same three records are a security control, which is why Linkysoft treats them as part of a cybersecurity review rather than a marketing chore. Without DMARC set to refuse, a stranger can write your company in the From line and send your customer an invoice carrying their own bank number. The customer pays it and blames you. Every web application Linkysoft builds is checked for the same thing from the other side, so its own receipts reach the inbox.