Email deliverability: the questions we get asked most

We end up explaining this on discovery calls often enough that it deserved writing down. The questions about email deliverability that come up most often on our calls.

The cheapest security work is the boring kind done on a schedule. Most teams find the first pass takes an afternoon and the maintenance takes minutes a month.

Do we need to care about this?

Authentication records decide whether mail reaches the inbox. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge.

How do we know it is working?

Monitor bounces before a campaign, not after. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. The version that survives contact with a real deadline is the simple one.

What this looks like day to day

The realistic threat for most small businesses is automated and opportunistic, not targeted. Three things worth confirming about email deliverability before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Sending from a shared address hurts your reputation — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.