Fazley RabbiYou wrote a careful email to potential buyers, sent it to your list, and heard nothing. Then a friend you had included says it arrived in their spam folder. Or replies dry up after the first few days of a campaign. Your offer may be fine; the mailbox providers simply do not trust the sender yet.
Deliverability comes down to four things: whether your domain is authenticated, what your sending history looks like, how many emails you send and how fast, and how clean your list is. Content matters too, but less than most people think.
Authenticate your domain
Large mailbox providers such as Gmail expect senders to prove that their email really comes from the domain it claims. Three DNS records do this:
- SPF lists the servers allowed to send email for your domain.
- DKIM adds a digital signature showing the message came from your domain and was not altered.
- DMARC tells receiving servers what to do when those checks fail, and can send you reports. Start with a monitoring-only policy, read the reports, then tighten it once all your genuine email passes.
Your email provider gives you the exact values to add in your domain's DNS settings. If you still send business outreach from a free personal address, start by setting up email on your own domain.
Many teams send cold outreach from a separate domain or subdomain, so that a reputation problem does not affect invoices and everyday mail. If you do this, make it clearly yours, with a working website, and authenticate it fully as well.
Warm up slowly and keep volume modest
A new domain or mailbox has no history. If it suddenly sends hundreds of emails, providers treat it with suspicion. Start by using the mailbox for normal conversations, then add a small number of outreach emails a day and increase gradually over several weeks, watching bounces and replies as you go. Automated warm-up services exist, but they are no substitute for real emails that real people answer.
Send fewer, better emails. Spread them across the working day rather than in one blast, keep the daily volume per mailbox modest, and pause to investigate if bounces or spam complaints rise. A sending tool that schedules and paces emails helps, but it cannot rescue a bad list.
Keep the list clean
- Never buy or scrape lists. They contain dead addresses and spam traps, and the people on them never agreed to hear from anyone.
- Verify addresses before the first send, and remove every hard bounce at once.
- Do not guess addresses in bulk.
- Remove anyone who asks you to stop, and keep a suppression list so they are never added again.
Reaching the right person in the first place helps too; see finding B2B decision-makers.
Write like a person, and stay honest
- Identify yourself clearly: your real name, your company and how to reach you.
- Offer an easy way out, such as "Reply 'no' and I won't email again", and honour it promptly.
- Keep it short and plain: no attachments in a first email, few links, no image-only messages, and no misleading subject lines such as a fake "Re:".
- Consider turning off open tracking. It adds tracking code, and open figures are unreliable anyway; replies are the number that counts.
Checking where you stand, and when to get help
Send a test to a Gmail account and use "Show original" to see whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC pass. Google Postmaster Tools can show reputation data for mail sent to Gmail once you send enough of it. Watch your own numbers too: bounces, replies and complaints for each campaign.
Writing, list cleaning and pacing are habits your team can own. DNS records, separate sending domains and repairing a damaged reputation are where an expert saves weeks of guesswork. This is part of my lead generation work; if your emails keep landing in spam, get in touch.
One test before your next campaign
Send one email from your outreach address to a Gmail account today, open "Show original", and check that SPF, DKIM and DMARC all say PASS. If any of them fail, fix that before you send another campaign.