Deliverability Issues - Here's What I Learned (and What You Need to Do)

How to stay out of the spam folder...

Hey,

How was your week?

Today I want to talk about email “deliverability”, because things have changed in the past few months, and it’s impacting newsletters.

TLDR (too long didn’t read): Email inbox systems are now demanding extra authenticity from email senders. There’s IT stuff in the background that flags emails as ‘genuine’ or junk and more emails are being checked more often. Substack looks after the IT stuff for us (yay) but we’d be idiots if we didn’t also take action to give our emails the best chance possible. There are four things to do that will help set your publication up for the future.

Deliverability is changing

This post was inspired by my frustration, as I spent ANOTHER chunk of time I didn’t want to spend wading around in my junk/spam folders. This week I fished out even more genuine emails than last week….

Buried amongst my usual junk folder sludge of messages from HelloFresh Affiliate, NationalDebtRelief, LeafFilter Partner and LumeDeodorant.com Associate, I found 12 legitimate emails I had requested, from trustworthy organisations, about recent and genuine interactions. Frustrating!

Every week I seem to be rescuing more emails from the soup. What is going on?

Something’s fishy in email land. Image by Freepik

IT stuff to (sort of) know

New protocols for email security checks were released by Google recently. The protocols aim to stop bad actors from impersonating genuine domains when they send emails.

Impersonating? Here’s what I mean: my business email addresses were impersonated by scammers in 2022. I received blackmail demands that appeared to come from my own email addresses. Very disconcerting!

That’s the type of thing the new protocols are trying to stop. Google, and (probably) Microsoft have added new checks that run in the background on email traffic. They work by examining things called DKIM and DMARC records.

What are DKIM and DMARC records? Erm. My partner, who’s an IT wizz, has explained this to me about a million times and patiently talked me through the process of checking/fixing DKIM records for my domain names, and I still can’t tell you exactly what any of this is, or how it works.

The main thing you need to know is that only genuine domain (website) owners can access the DKIM and DMARC records for that domain. Bad actors can still impersonate email addresses, but the resulting emails don’t have the correct DKIM and DMARC settings so they don’t pass the authenticity tests. They still look ‘real’ to you and me, but they don’t look ‘real’ to the email-checking bots, and so they end up in junk.

What does this mean for newsletter owners?

Newsletter writers don’t want their emails to end up in spam. So their email sender domain records have got to be just right. I spent ages setting up DKIM/DMARC records for the email service provider I use for my food safety business, hoping to keep my marketing emails out of spam.

Substack doesn’t give publication owners control of their records. This could be a very bad thing, but fortunately, Substack seems to have got the back end right. Of all the genuine emails I rescued from junk this month, not one was from a Substack publication. However, newsletters sent via other service providers did end up in my junk folders.

You’re saying Substack writers don’t need to worry?

Substack publication owners don’t need to worry about the IT stuff (coz Substack’s good like that). But we still need to do what we can to keep our emails getting through.

Unfortunately, we won’t ever really know what the big email software companies are going to change from day to day in the background. The deliverability landscape is going to keep changing as the ‘good guys’ try to stay in front of the scammers and spammers who are constantly finding new ways to get into our inboxes.

That means you need to do everything you can to keep your publication looking genuine and squeaky clean to the email gods.

Recommended actions

You can’t control email deliverability protocols, and you can’t do anything to ensure that every email you send will be received by the people who want it. But there are things you can do that will help ‘flag’ your emails as trustworthy.

Here is what me and my (IT-wizz) partner recommend you should do:

1. Ask your subscribers to reply to your Welcome email. Replies are the number one way to show systems your emails are not spam.

2. Encourage your subscribers to click links in your emails, another good way to signal authentic reader/sender interactions.

3. Clean your email list once or twice a year to remove people who aren’t opening or interacting with your emails.

4. Consider using double opt-in, a feature that confirms your readers have actively consented to get your eamils. If the email gods aren’t paying attention to this now, there’s every chance they will in future.

Okay that’s it!

Now I’m off to wade through my other junk folders. Wish me luck.

Karen

P.S. If you have a non-Substack email list and need help with DKIM and DMARC settings, my partner can give you a hand. Write to me by DM or at PubstackSuccess@substack.com and I will put you in touch with him.