Email keeps being written off and keeps outperforming the channels that were supposed to replace it. The reason is simple enough: it is the only place you can reach your audience directly, without an algorithm deciding whether the message is worth showing.
What has changed is the standard required to achieve email deliverability. Over the past two years the major providers have raised the bar on who is allowed into the inbox, and while that has caused some short term pain, it is genuinely good news for businesses sending legitimate email. The floor has been lifted, the noise has been reduced, and the senders who do things properly get a cleaner run than they did before.
Here is what that involves.
1. Prove the email is really from you
Three DNS records do the work, and they are worth understanding rather than delegating blindly, because they are the foundation everything else sits on.
SPF lists which servers are permitted to send email using your domain. DKIM adds a cryptographic signature so a receiving server can confirm the message was not altered in transit. DMARC ties the two together: it tells receiving servers what to do when a message fails those checks, and it gives you reporting on who is sending email in your name.
That last function is the one most businesses do not realise they are missing. Without DMARC you have no visibility of anyone using your domain to send email, and no way to instruct the world’s mail servers to reject it.
The providers have now made this explicit. From 1 February 2024, Gmail required all senders to have SPF or DKIM in place, valid forward and reverse DNS for their sending servers, TLS in transit, and spam complaint rates kept below 0.3% as measured in Postmaster Tools. Senders of 5,000 or more messages a day to Gmail must have both SPF and DKIM, must publish DMARC, and must have the From address align with the SPF or DKIM domain.
Microsoft followed on 5 May 2025 with its own requirements for senders of 5,000 or more messages a day to Outlook.com, Hotmail and Live. SPF, DKIM and DMARC all required, DMARC at minimum set to p=none and aligned with SPF or DKIM, ideally both. The consequence is firmer than filtering: non compliant messages are rejected outright, returning a 550 5.7.15 access denied error rather than quietly landing in junk.
Worth doing: check all three records for every domain you send from, including any your email platform sends on your behalf. Then confirm alignment, because having the records present but misaligned is a common and invisible failure.
2. Protect your name while you are in there
There is a second benefit to DMARC that is easy to overlook, and for many businesses it is the more valuable one.
Email spoofing works by sending messages that appear to come from your domain. Your customers see your name in the From field. Your suppliers see your name on an invoice with changed bank details. You may never know it happened, because the messages never touch your systems.
A DMARC policy set to enforce tells receiving mail servers to reject those messages. It is one of the few marketing adjacent tasks that is also a genuine security control, and it protects people who trust you.
The sequence matters. Start at p=none and read the reports for a few weeks so you can see every legitimate service sending on your behalf, including your accounting software, your booking system and your CRM. Then move to quarantine, then to reject. Moving straight to enforcement without looking at the reports first is how businesses accidentally block their own invoices.
Worth doing: publish DMARC at p=none, turn on reporting, and give it a month of observation before tightening. If you already have DMARC, check whether it ever progressed past p=none, because a great many never do.
3. Send to people who want it
Deliverability is not only technical. Providers watch how recipients respond, and a list that people engage with earns you a better reputation over time.
That makes list quality a commercial asset rather than an administrative chore. Practically it means keeping permission clean, suppressing hard bounces and unsubscribes properly, and separating the people who open from the people who have not engaged in a year. Sending everything to everyone teaches the mail providers that your email is not worth showing.
A word on reactivating an old list, since most businesses have one. Do not send to everyone at once after a long silence. Start with your most recently engaged contacts, establish a clean sending history, then widen in stages. It takes a little longer and it protects the domain you will be sending from for years.
Worth doing: clean and deduplicate your list, split active from dormant, and set a standard for how often each group hears from you.
4. Make unsubscribing easy
This feels counterintuitive and it is one of the highest return things you can do.
Gmail requires bulk senders to support one click unsubscribe and to include a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message. But the case for doing it well is not only compliance. When leaving is hard, people mark the message as spam instead, and spam complaints are what damage your reputation with providers. A clean exit costs you a contact. A complaint costs you deliverability for everyone else on the list.
A generous unsubscribe also leaves the relationship intact. Someone who leaves a list without friction can come back. Someone who had to fight their way out will not.
Worth doing: test your own unsubscribe from a phone, and count the clicks. If it is more than two, fix it this week.
5. Make it worth opening
All of the above gets you into the inbox. None of it makes anyone glad you arrived.
This is where the newsletter still has something the rest of marketing has lost. It is one of the few remaining formats where a real person writes directly to people who know them, in their own voice, without an algorithm in between. Given how much automated content people now wade through, that directness has become a genuine differentiator rather than a nostalgic one.
What tends to work is unglamorous. One clear idea per send rather than a digest of everything. Something genuinely useful that does not require the reader to buy anything. A recognisable voice, ideally a named person rather than the company. And consistency, because a newsletter that arrives when you happen to have news is not a newsletter, it is an announcement.
Worth doing: decide who writes it, what day it goes, and what the reader reliably gets from it. Then send the next twelve regardless of whether you have news, because the rhythm is the product.
Where to start with email deliverability
If you do one thing, check your authentication. It is finite, it can be verified, and if DMARC is missing or sitting unenforced then both your deliverability and your customers’ protection are weaker than you think.
After that it is list quality, then content, in that order. There is no point writing a better newsletter to a list that is not receiving it.
Happy to set the technical side up properly and keep the sending consistent month after month. Give us a call.
Sources
- Gmail sender guidelines (support.google.com/mail/answer/81126)
- Microsoft Outlook high volume sender requirements, effective 5 May 2025 (dmarcian.com)
