We hear a LOT of mixed advice about email deliverability. So often, though, we wind up focusing on the wrong stuff.

And today’s guest is here to steer us in the right direction using his insights from years in this space.

Meet Pavel Ivanishchev, deliverability expert and the founder of SendPoint, a newsletter we’re huge fans of because of its focus on the stuff that matters around email deliverability.

Pavel’s knowledge as a deliverability consultant and email strategist also knows no bounds. He’s helped email senders across the globe not only focus on the technical side of getting to the inbox, but has also helped those clients stay there using sound email practices.

Today, he’s here to share some insight on the stuff that truly matters in your deliverability, and we can confidently say these are designed to help future-proof your email strategy.

So, let’s dive in and learn from this week’s expert insight!

When I sat down to write this, I planned to write about the technical side of email.

SPF, DKIM, sender reputation. The unglamorous plumbing nobody thinks about until it floods, really. It’s what I get paid for, so it was initially the obvious thing to bring you.

But the longer I sat with it, the more I knew that’s not what I want to tell you. I want to tell you about something I got wrong for many years, and I think you might be getting it wrong, too.

For most of my career, I treated deliverability as the finish line. Get the email to the inbox, and that’s the win, right? And when you’re spending all day fixing authentication and fighting blocklists, it feels like the whole game, so you push placement to 99%, and you screenshot it.

Then one day it hits you. Perfect inbox placement on an email nobody opens is a perfect score on a test that, honestly, didn’t matter. The message arrived, and nothing happened. No open, no click, no reply.

And that’s when it clicks…

The inbox was never the goal. It’s just the door.

When you think about reputation, you probably think about your domain.

The records, the warm-up, and the score in some dashboard. Yes, that still matters, because it’s how you start, how you re-ramp, and also how you keep the house standing.

But the mailbox providers watch something deeper than your domain, friends

They watch the relationship.

They see how often you open someone’s mail, how long you read before you bail, whether you click, or close it in two seconds, or reply, or leave it sitting unread until it turns into inbox-fodder.

But they don’t judge your DNS. They judge whether anyone wants you.

Reputation isn’t a technical score (unfortunately). It’s a behavioural one, and behaviour comes from value, not from records.

That flips the whole shape of the thing, because you probably picture a pipeline: first you make the email able to land, then you hand off, then the content people take over.

Step one, step two, and finished (I pictured it that way for years).

In reality, however, it isn’t a pipeline, but rather a loop.

Good content earns engagement.
Engagement builds reputation.
Reputation is deliverability.
Deliverability earns the next send.

And around it goes.

So you and I aren’t standing at two ends of a line.

We’re standing in the same circle, with our backs to each other, and half the time we’ve never even spoken.

The ground also keeps moving under us, and it moves in one direction.

Apple made opens unreliable. Gmail and Yahoo forced real authentication on bulk senders. More changes are moving through the protocol layer as I write this.

All different changes, headed in the same direction: the providers trust the technical signals less and watch what people actually do more.

Then there’s AI, and this is the one I’d lose sleep over if I were you…

AI now reads your email before your customer does. It judges your message on a summary (without your copy, your design, or your flow), and if the value isn’t obvious in one line, the rest of the email might…well, it may as well not exist.

In ecom, that already hurts. In a newsletter, it’s the same truth in slower motion. Bring real value, and they stay. Don’t, and that summary is likely your last contact.

So watch where the fight is going.

The fight for the inbox is mostly hygiene, and it’s getting harder, but you can win it. The fight for attention is the ugly one, and it will be harder than you think.

There’s more email every year, more noise, and now AI is standing between you and the reader. Blasting hundreds of thousands of emails and winning on sheer volume already barely works.

Give it a few years, and it won’t work at all.

This is why the wall has to come down.

Companies file deliverability under IT (the technical stuff), and hand content and strategy over to the marketing team.

They then call us in like plumbers, after the flood, but we technical folks are never in the room when someone makes those strategic decisions that cause issues.

Because, in reality, the decisions that wreck deliverability are often never technical, and the decisions that help deliverability win often aren’t either.

They’re the offer, the CTA, the way you talk to a human through a screen, whether anyone tested things instead of guessing.

That work doesn’t belong to one person in one corner either. It belongs to the designer, the marketer, the sales team, the buyer side (if you’re an enterprise), or to you, wearing every hat at once in a small shop. There are also us folks on the tech and IT side, but we’re only a small part of the mix.

The email senders who will really win in the inbox over the next five years? Yeah, they’re the ones who treat the entire email ecosystem as a single, unified system.

It’s not going to be those with the tidiest DNS.

Allow me to leave you where I left myself.

Getting to the inbox is simply getting to the door. Reaching the door, however, doesn’t mean they’ll let you in.

And only one simple question now matters:

Did it matter to the person who received it?

Everything else, including my part, is only there to make that possible.

So, if you’re uncertain about your deliverability, how to approach getting into (and staying) in the inbox, I regularly write about this in my newsletter, Send Point.

I’d love to have you sign up, learn more an stay at the forefront of what you can do to focus on the right stuff.

Your friend,
Pavel 🧙‍♂️

Before we end today’s email, one of the critical aspects we so often forget is that email deliverability begins with solid list hygiene.

But we also know that "clean your list" can feel like a big, intimidating task, especially if you've never done it before.

So here's an easy way to get started and give it a try. Bouncer has a free email checker that lets you verify individual email addresses right on their site (no sign-up, no credit card, nothing).

Just pop in an address and see what comes back.

It'll tell you if that address is deliverable, risky, or flat-out invalid, and even flags things like disposable emails and role-based addresses (hello, info@). If you've ever wondered whether those old addresses on your list are still alive, this is a zero-commitment way to find out.

It’s also a great way to protect your deliverability by keeping a clean list!

(P.S. Sign up while you’re at it and you'll get 100 free verification credits to play with, too, but you didn’t hear that from us).

Give email verification a try here.

Thinking about deliverability in a different light after that?

If you have any feedback or knowledge to share, click here! Oh, and please share this email with your friends and colleagues if you think they’ll find value over here.

Your feedback only makes us better.

Your friend in email,

Des