Deliverability
Definition
Whether your email reaches the inbox at all. The receiving provider decides before your subject line gets a vote.
How it works
Two layers. Authentication: SPF, DKIM and DMARC are DNS records proving the mail is yours; where any of the three fails, mail can be discarded unread. Reputation: the provider reads how recipients treat what you send. Dead addresses bounce and annoyed people press the spam button; both write to your domain’s history, and so does silence from recipients who never open. Sending to an uncleaned list feeds the first two in bulk. A new sending domain has no history, so full volume from day one reads as spam; warm the domain with small sends to the recipients most likely to open, stepping volume up over weeks. No provider publishes its thresholds, so an absolute target means little; the meaningful reference is your own baseline, send over send.
What to watch for
Open your email platform’s domain health page and check that all three authentication records pass, especially after a domain or platform move, where half-done setups survive quietly. The bounce and complaint rates sit in every send report; check when yours were last read, and whether that reading happened before or after the last campaign that underperformed. A step change in either rate after one send names that send. And set the list’s cleaning rule from your own cadence: a contact who has ignored a year of weekly sends is a different signal from one who missed a single quarterly newsletter.
The question you ask
“Do SPF, DKIM and DMARC all pass on the domain we send from?”