Deliverability Responsibilities & Troubleshooting

Deliverability Responsibilities

Reaching the inbox is a collaborative effort between our platform and you. While we maintain reliable sending infrastructure, provide domain authentication tools, and manage IP reputations, your sending habits and list health dictate your ultimate success. This guide covers how to maximise your deliverability and troubleshoot common roadblocks. 

Us (The EMSP or Electronic Messaging Service Provider)

We are responsible for the reliability of our infrastructure and providing the tools you need for success. This includes: 

• Providing general advice and documentation on deliverability best practices and how to improve email content and sending behaviour for best results
• Providing the features and documentation to authenticate one or more domains for sending emails
• Enforcing the requirement to validate sender addresses, and authenticate domains via DNS records to ensure the best possible deliverability outcomes, and align with universal requirements for safe mail authentication
• Restricting any send behaviour made by accounts that breach the SPAM act or could result in a negative impact to our IP sender reputation, to reduce this impact being felt by other accounts, and damaging our service reputation
• Reporting as accurately as possible on the deliverability of sends, including:
  • Delivery and open rates
  • Bounce rates and error codes
  • Unsubscribe and complaint rates
• Thorough investigation into poor deliverability in abnormal situations where there is no clear reason, and all best practice requirements have been followed
• Automatic detection and removal of our IP addresses from public blocklists, which will impact deliverability for other accounts
• Escalation to service providers in the event of severe domain blocklisting and negative sender reputation determinations, when we determine that the reason is not justified

You (the Entity)

As the sender, you are responsible for the content you send and the audience you communicate to. This includes:

• Ensure the contacts you send to have explicitly consented to receiving emails from your business or entity
• General list health which includes removing low-engagement, deactivated, unsubscribed, or incorrectly entered addresses periodically
• Awareness of sender’s best practices such as:
  • Not sending too frequently to the same list (more than twice a week)
  • Not sending infrequently from the domain (less than once a fortnight)
  • Not sending repeatedly to bounced contacts
  • Not manipulating unsubscribe data to allow sending to those that have revoked consent
  • Reviewing email design best practices and/or via external learning
• Checking that you’re happy with with the email content before sending, as emails cannot be retracted
  Implementation and maintenance of provided DNS records to authenticate their domain for sending
• Validation of sender addresses used for sending
• Communicating with individual recipients or companies and requesting the whitelisting of their sending domains in the event of network security or mail server blocks
• Government/education departments often need to whitelist their own sending domain for internal mailouts to staff
• Regular maintenance of Account Users to ensure only authorised employees/contractors have access to send mail, and they have been educated on best practices and internal requirements
• Awareness of the SPAM Act and Acceptable Use Policy so as to make every effort not to breach these requirements
   

External Dependencies (3rd Parties)

Certain variables are dictated entirely by the receiving network, such as:

• Recipient Mail Servers & Security Protocols: Recipient servers or network security firewalls blocking mail originating from our IPs or your sending domain.
• ISP Filtering & Automated Mail Categorization: Internal algorithms used by major Email Service Providers (ESPs) sorting delivered emails away from the main inbox (e.g., Google delivering legitimate emails directly to the "Promotions" or "Updates" tab, or Microsoft routing messages to "Junk").
• Provider-Level Blocks: Large ESPs (particularly Microsoft) deeming sending activity suspicious based on a false positive, resulting in blocks at either the IP or domain level.
• Third-Party Blocklists: External blocklists falsely implementing restrictions at either the IP or domain level.
• Infrastructure Outages: Outages or degradation within third-party network infrastructure impacting the chain of delivery.

Best Practices for Inbox Success

Domain authentication is your deliverability passport. It tells receiving mail servers that you are exactly who you say you are.

• Action: Ensure your sending domain is fully authenticated using SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Sending from an unauthenticated domain will likely result in poor delivery rates or your emails being flagged as spam.

Maintaining a healthy, consenting list: A clean database is the foundation of good deliverability.

• Use Double Opt-in: Require subscribers to verify their email address before being added to your list. This prevents fake or mistyped addresses and protects your forms from bot attacks, automated form spam, and malicious contact floods that can degrade your list quality.
• Never Buy Lists: Purchased lists are full of spam traps and unengaged contacts that will instantly destroy your sender reputation (and breach the SPAM Act). Additionally, these contacts have never given explicit consent to hear from your business, directly breaching the SPAM Act.
• Clean Regularly: Routinely remove inactive subscribers and permanently bouncing email addresses.
• Set Up an Email Preference Center: Give your subscribers control over what they receive. Allowing them to "opt-down" to fewer emails or choose specific topics is far better than having them hit the dreaded "Mark as Spam" button or unsubscribe completely. 

Spam-proof your email content: Spam filters actively scan your content. To avoid getting flagged:

• Balance text & images: Don't send an email that is just one large image. Ensure a healthy text-to-image ratio.
• Optimise image file sizes: Heavy emails can trigger spam filters or fail to load for the recipient. Compress your images and keep individual file sizes under 250 KB for optimal loading times. 
• Watch your words: Avoid overusing spam trigger words like "Free," "Urgent," or excessive symbols (!!!, $$$).
• Format responsively: Keep your email width between 600-800 pixels and ensure it looks great on both desktop and mobile devices.

Manage your sending habits: Consistency is key to building trust with Internet Service Providers (ISPs).

• Monitor volume & frequency: Avoid erratic sending patterns or emailing your list too frequently (e.g., multiple times a day). Sending too many emails in quick succession can cause ISP's to view your domain as suspicious, causing them to route your mail to the junk folder. Conversely, try not to send too infrequently (less than once a fortnight) from your domain, as going completely dormant can also hurt your reputation.

Troubleshooting Common Deliverability Issues

The report says "Delivered," but the contact hasn't received it.

This is one of the most common deliverability hurdles. When an email is marked "Delivered," it means the recipient's mail server has successfully accepted the email from our platform. However, their internal server (especially strict corporate firewalls) may have placed the email in a quarantine folder for further screening.

Solution: If this happens consistently with one or more contacts using the same domain, advise the recipient to ask their IT department to "whitelist" your sending domain.

My open and click rates are unusually high right after sending.

If you see a massive spike in opens and clicks within minutes of sending, it is most likely due to "bot-clicks”. Many corporate mail servers use security software to pre-screen incoming mail. These bots "click" every link in your email to ensure they don't lead to malicious sites or download dangerous software, which can potentially impact the accuracy of click reporting.

Solution: There is unfortunately no guaranteed method to prevent this, you can only take every precaution to remove any reason for a third-party system to screen your mail. Security bots aggressively target specific types of content, so to minimise bot clicks you should try and avoid:

• Sudden, sharp increases in send volume from a specific domain
• Links to sites without an SSL certificate (always use https://)
• Links to externally hosted PDF files
• Shortened URLs (like Bitly)
• Emails consisting of a single, hyperlinked image

A large number of contacts from the same domain didn't receive the email.

If contacts across example.com are not receiving your email, but Gmail or Yahoo addresses are, the example.com mail server has likely blocked the send.

Solution (Self-Sending): This often happens with Government, Education, or large corporate departments trying to send internal newsletters to their own staff. Internal servers don't like seeing mail sent and received by the same domain with an external platform in the middle. We would recommend that you ask your internal IT team to “whitelist” our sending IP ranges.
 

High Bounce Rates Bounces mean the email was rejected.

There are two main types which are Soft Bounces (Temporary) where the inbox was full, or the server was temporarily down and Hard Bounces (Permanent) where the email address no longer exists.

Solution: Always check your bounce reporting. If you see emails bouncing due to blocklists or content filters, review your content for spam triggers or reach out to our Support team for further investigation. Continuing to send to bounced contacts will severely damage your reputation.