Dear Email Dear friends, 

Wow. Just…wow. The love for email this Valentine’s Day was real. From heartfelt tributes to playful jabs, the #DearEmail campaign reminded us just how much this channel means to the people who use it, build for it, and rely on it every day. 

Here are the Four Biggest Trends in Email Today (and A Few Surprising Omissions) 

“#DearEmail, You had me at HELO. Love you always (more each day).” – Carmi López-Jones, Manager of Deliverability Success for Hubspot

We saw Dear Email letters that were nostalgic, poetic, and delightfully nerdy. People thanked email for giving them a career, for being reliable when other platforms disappeared, for teaching them about data and connection. 

“You’ve never been flashy, never the latest shiny thing, but that’s part of what I love about you. You’re reliable, adaptable, and quietly powerful.” – Kath Pay, Founder & CEO of Holistic Email Marketing 

“I remember the first time I really got email. It wasn’t some grand, “aha” moment. It was when I realized how an entire ecosystem works together to make email work the way it does. That spark and feeling of connection has kept me hooked for 20 years. It’s what drives my passion for email.” – Tim Moore, CEO at SocketLabs 

“Thank you, email, for the life you have given me and all the highs and lows we’ve faced together over the years. Here’s to many more!” – Autumn Tyr-Salvia, Klaviyo 

And woven through those stories were quiet signals about where email is headed next. 

“I’ve watched you evolve faster than a Pokemon with a Rare Candy, from plain-text messages to a dynamic platform for marketing, offering interactivity, and more.” – Andrew Bonar, Managing Director at emailexpert 

“You’ve brought challenges, from deliverability hurdles to endless optimization, but also an incredible community of experts (and friends!) who keep pushing the industry forward. Through it all, you continue to deliver.” – Brandon Dingae, Chief Revenue Officer for SocketLabs 

At SocketLabs, we read every one of those letters. Not just because we love this community (we do), but because this is the kind of reflection that keeps us grounded in what matters. We saw ourselves in many of your words, and it made us think about how our work fits into the future you’re imagining. 

So, here’s our read on the four themes we saw rising to the top of the (Linked)inbox. 

1. The Importance of Domain-based Reputation Keeps Growing (in a big way) 

More than a few of you hinted at it: email’s shifting, and the rules of the road are changing. Over the last couple years, we’ve seen major mailbox providers (MBPs) make both official and unofficial moves toward prioritizing domain reputation.  

More focus on domain security (and reputation) by major mailbox providers 

From Google and Yahoo’s highly publicized rules that went into effect for bulk senders in early 2024, to quieter and actually more impactful treatment of unauthenticated mail by providers like Comcast and Microsoft, the evidence is there to support domain reputation plays a larger part in inboxing decisions than ever before. 

In fact, shortly after rolling out their new requirements, Google updated their Postmaster Tools to show domain reputation for senders, allowing folks to get a direct look at how Google perceives their domain. Similarly, Yahoo spun up a Sender Hub, also designed to help people understand their domain reputation. 

Proof of domain-based decisions is in the (email failure) pudding 

Domain-based decisions are being noted in more failure responses.

The interesting thing is, Google and Yahoo are still slowwwly rolling out enforcement on their sender requirements, which means they’re only bouncing a portion of the mail not adhering to their guidelines. Meanwhile, our data showed Microsoft — who just officially announced their requirement of full email authentication (including DMARC) this week — was more stringent on mail than either of those two. 

We felt that shift early. And because we’re obsessed with how mail travels (not just whether it lands), we rebuilt how our delivery engine prioritizes messages… 

Now, if you’ve got a strong domain reputation and you’re doing things right, you don’t have to wait behind a sender who isn’t. It’s a bit like opening a fast lane for good behavior. And in those weird edge cases — like when a provider is temporarily down — we lean into smart delays instead of bouncing prematurely. Because, as one sender put it, it’s heartbreaking when good mail gets punished for something out of its control. 

According to data available through our Spotlight analytics platform… It looks like we’re the only ones operating this way.  

Which brings me to the next trend we saw in the community’s odes to email…

2. The Tech Behind Email Is Still Playing Catch-Up  

We saw plenty of love for email’s longevity… mixed in with a heavy dose of playful sarcasm over some of the less-than-ideal aspects of email. 

“What impresses us most? You never stay stagnant. You’ve evolved with us, offering more personalized experiences, smarter automation, and deeper customer insight. You prove time and again that you’re not just relevant—you’re essential. Our design team, though? They have notes.” – Team Ragnarok 

“Thank you for being the backbone of modern communication, the ultimate digital packrat, storing millions of messages that nobody ever deletes. Your SMTP, IMAP, and POP3 services are like a fine wine… aged, temperamental, and sometimes requiring a full restart to function properly.” – Tom Bartel, SVP Data Services at Validity 

“It’s not a perfect relationship. We’ve had our ups and downs, you manage to endlessly confuse and intrigue me in equal measure. You like to change the rules at short notice, you get more fussy with age, you see all the newer communication tools out there, and yet still keep going doing your thing.” Alice Spencer, Senior Manager of Deliverability Services for Ometria 

That truth came through loud and clear in a few of the #DearEmail letters we loved most. 

“Here’s to many more years ahead of us — JUST PLEASE stop complaining to Google and SNDS. We can work through this like mature adults. Can we agree on a couples’ therapy session? I’d prefer not to chase your feedback loops through every postmaster tool.” – Giada Sartor, CRM & Email Marketing Team Leader at Jobrapido 

Then of course, there was Spamhaus’s Matthew Stith who basically pointed out that spam filters still need therapy, and Al Iverson of Spam Resource fame reminded us (in his blog post) that email deliverability’s been around for more than 20 years, yet some of the most basic infrastructure — like full authentication — has only just become mandatory. It’s giving: “We love you, but you’ve got some growing up to do.” 

But here’s the upside: the tides are turning. It feels like we’re finally gaining ground. Standards are catching up. Conversations between senders and receivers are happening more often — and with more collaboration to make email a safe and enjoyable place for our mutual customers to hang out. And the tech is finally starting to meet the moment. 

“Dear Email […] Your future is bright, and the unprecedented commitment from mailbox providers to refine and improve data and tools shows just how much you’re still evolving. And we can’t forget the work getting started within the IETF around DKIM to make your path to inboxes around the world even more reliable” – Brian Godiksen, DelivOps & Director of Client Services for SocketLabs

SocketLabs is Innovating in Both Email Delivery and Performance Analysis 

At SocketLabs, we’ve taken that cue to heart. From rebuilding our delivery engine to help good mail move faster, to building out tools like our Spotlight analytics platform, we’re focused on helping practitioners feel like they’re operating in the future — not stuck in email’s past. Not flashy. Just functional in all the right ways. 

“Precision matters in every step of your strategy. What I love about email is how making wise choices can significantly impact your success.” – Bill Volz, Cofounder and CTO at SocketLabs 

For those senders who need or just want a little more control, we also offer Rule Engine, allowing our senders to create automated rules to intelligently route mail through various IP pools and other configurations (to your specifications) for more consistent delivery. 

Remember how we said we’re queuing mail differently today than we were just over a year ago? We’ll let these numbers do the talking. Just look at how quickly and dramatically we reduced our own delivery errors with one (admittedly pretty simple) change to how we process mail. 

3. Email’s Winning on Trust in a Noisy World 

Email is where people turn when they need substance over noise. 

“I love you. Really, I do…for so many reasons. But if I had to choose my favorite thing about you, I’d say it’s that bangin’ spam folder you got. In a world full of platforms all trying to get my attention and force it where it doesn’t want to go, you still give me the ability to say ‘No’.” – Will Boyd, Sr. Marketing Automations Specialist for the Memphis Grizzlies 

“Email, my love, Always be mine, Social media is toxic, You’re the best of all time” – Alison Gootee, Compliance & Deliverability Enablement Principal II at Braze 

Email gets called a lot of things, but when the community says this, it means something. 

“Thank you for not being X. Affectionately yours,” – Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability for Kickbox 

Those lines hit home. It’s not that people no longer crave the connection social media provided (somewhat safely) for a long time. In fact, I’d venture to say we crave connection now, more than ever. 

“From mothers talking to enlisted sons overseas to organizations educating global audiences through newsletters, you’ve given a free voice through distances and previous boundaries that would have been impossible otherwise.” – Travis Hazlewood, Head of Email Deliverability for Ortto 

It’s when online community spaces become chaotic or worse that people remember good ol’ email. It doesn’t need to be loud to be effective. It just needs to be consistent, transparent, and ready when your audience is. 

“You fill my days and my inbox(es), yet still I find you interesting. You’re never a bother; you wait for me to come to you.” – Abby Gailey, Director of Marketing Operations for Vibrent Health 

“Everything else felt so disruptive and then I found you, an introvert’s dream! You seek attention in a different way and I love figuring you out!” – Fiza Naseem,  Email Marketing Specialist for EasyDMARC 

And it’s living up to expectations: In fact, email volume grew from 281.1 billion emails sent in 2018 to 347.7 billion in 2023, with projections of up to 408.2 billion in 2027. 

“You are more than a technology, you are a bridge, a lifeline, delivering messages that matter. […] In a world that constantly evolves, you remain essential, and my passion for you has never wavered.” – Alfred Wang, 18-year industry veteran 

Email Isn’t Just Part of What We Do — It’s All of It 

When people say, “Email is back,” we laugh. Because it never left. It just needed people who cared enough to keep making it better. 

None of us do this work because it’s trendy. We do it because email is worth showing up for — with better tools, smarter decisions, and real respect for what makes this channel great. 

That’s why we’ve stayed hyper-focused on email. Not SMS. Not CRM. Just email. It’s what we know. It’s what we do. And we’re here for the long game.  

Some of our competitors are busy turning their ESPs into something else entirely — email’s on autopilot while they put their energy into other channels. It’s maintenance-mode over there… just enough to keep the lights on. But the folks who rely on email every day deserve more than that.  

We’re doing the opposite. We’re doubling down on email. Solving the real, hard problems around deliverability, compliance, routing, and analytics — and building tools like Spotlight and Rule Engine to help ESPs (and their senders) stay in control and deliver email reliably. 

We also don’t take shortcuts. Every sender on our platform is held to strict compliance and anti-abuse policies. Not because it’s easy, but because the trustworthiness of this channel depends on all of us doing it right. 

TL;DR – We’re email people — the kind who write love letters to it, build for it, and obsess over how to make it better. We wouldn’t have it any other way.  

4. AI Isn’t the Story — But It’s in the Subtext 

Truth be told, we thought there’d be more AI hype in the #DearEmail campaign (even if only for the pure snark of it all). But what we saw instead was actually more interesting. AI was quietly embedded in conversations about automation, personalization, smart data, and workflow shortcuts. But it didn’t feel forced… it felt like a reflection of how practitioners are actually using it today. 

“You combine complex data points, content with depth, appealing design (and even a little science!) all into one magical package. You have the power to inform, motivate, and even delight millions of people every single day.” – Stefani Read, Senior Marketing Automation Manager for SS&C Technologies 

“You are more than strategy, subject lines, KPIs, timing, automation flow and personalization. […] You taught me how data fuels success, turning numbers into insights and insights into action. Data-driven marketing is storytelling with purpose—leading every step toward growth.” – Eingyin Khaing, student 

That feels right. 

AI will be (and already is) a tool changing the way people build, send, receive, analyze, and interact with email. But it should not be the end-all-be-all. In fact, it shouldn’t even be a part of the discussion until you’ve spent time understanding, cleaning up, and analyzing your data to ensure whatever model you have running can be trusted. 

What You Do Before — and During — the AI Matters More 

Which is why at SocketLabs, we’re not slapping AI on everything. But we are using it in our Spotlight analytics platform to surface insights faster, crunch numbers from a variety of sources more intelligently, and help you answer questions like “what’s wrong with my performance?” before you even ask them. 

Here’s the thing though: AI is only as good as the people guiding it.  

Take it from Jaina Mistry, of Litmus:

“Email taught me the importance of data. But that sometimes you need to trust your instincts on what you know to be the best action, despite what the data might be telling you.” 

The setup matters, but it’s not just about getting the inputs right. It’s about staying engaged with the outcomes. That’s why we believe in keeping humans deeply in the loop. Email has a LOT of nuances (to put it lightly), so anyone using AI needs to be asking the right questions, providing ample context, validating the outputs, and applying scrutiny where it counts. AI should be your co-pilot, not your autopilot. 

We’re not building something that takes decisions out of your hands. We’re building tools that help you make smarter ones, faster… which is clearly necessary when you consider all the things that email people are tasked with (most of which is behind the scenes work that goes unappreciated). 

“Working with email is a humbling experience. It takes an understanding of legal requirements, human psychology, technical setup, and deeply outdated rendering platforms. It takes the ability to sift through data, tell stories, and weed out bullshit “advice” from people who can “totally guarantee inboxing with this one weird trick!” It takes finesse, it takes flair, it takes a certain willingness to roll up your sleeves and figure things out.” – Skyler Holobach – VP, Product Design and Experience here at SocketLabs  

If you’re tired of dashboard fatigue and want your data to actually tell you something, that’s what we’ve created. Just enough automation to make you feel like the smartest person in the room — not the most replaceable. 

That’s the tip of the iceberg, so if you’re interested in learning more, head over here to read a bit more about it and see a video of it in action. 

After all, our Head of Product Louis Driving Hawk said it best in his own letter: “What keeps me coming back? You evolve daily, making every data point count.” 

And if you’re still warming up to all this change? That’s okay too. It’s kind of like realizing the song you’ve been humming for weeks is actually by Taylor Swift. You didn’t want to love it. But here you are. Welcome to your Swiftamine moment. 

These aren’t just features — they’re responses to the challenges and aspirations about email that you shared. We’re not building email’s future in a vacuum. We’re building it with you. 

XOXO, SocketLabs 

To the email geeks and DelivOps pros, the compliance warriors, and the campaign dreamers — we see you. Thanks for reminding us why we do what we do. 

“You’ve got your quirks but so do I. Maybe that’s why we get along. You never make it easy, but I’m here for it 4ever. XOXO” – Lauren Del Vecchio, Email Deliverability Manager at Yotpo 

“Love that you keep it interesting, even after all these years” – Rachel McCarthy, Director of Customer Success at SocketLabs 

If any of this resonated — the passion, the pain points, the potential — you’re our people. 

And if you’re looking for tools that treat email with the same care you do, we’d love to show you what we’re building. Let’s talk. Let’s collaborate. Let’s make this channel even better, together. 

WE LOVE EMAIL! Woo! But we know loving email can be complicated and messy, like all relationships at some point. If you’re still figuring out where your mail fits in this new era, you can count on us being at your side. 

Abby Gailey said it best, and we’ll send you off with her note: “The people who love [email] are a special kind of people. They’re my kind of Geeks.” 

Yeah, they are.  

You can check out allllll the Dear Email love letters we’ve found in the wild so far.

See one we missed? Let us know. We’d love to add it!

Little did we know how much the world would change back in the 1990s when email made its first appearance. Some of us knew a professional world without email and some of us were just kids, but all of us were adopting a new technology that would completely change the landscape of communication forever. 

We’ve never been the type to be dramatic (not us, no), but email is…kind of a big deal. If you think we’re just another ESP and email analytics platform trying to get you to send more email, think again. We’re but one small part of a massive, global community that’s seriously passionate about email.  

Let’s talk about how massive, and more importantly, how meaningful email is: 

As of January 2025, MediaPost says there are 4.48B email users around the world — that is 4.48B opportunities to connect, share, and build meaningful relationships. 

Email volume grew from 281.1 BILLION emails sent in 2018 to 347.7 billion in 2023, with projections of up to 408.2 billion in 2027…which is just two years away now. 

In 2023, the global email marketing market was valued at $8.3B and the source projected the figure would increase to $18.9 billion by 2028. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for that period is expected to amount to 18.8%. That’s a lot of love being invested in email! 

Statista reports 87% of marketers have plans to increase or maintain their email marketing spending in the future. They understand that email isn’t just a transaction; it’s a conversation, a relationship. 

These figures don’t even touch the nuance of email, like the increase in popularity of email newsletters as evidenced by the meteoric rise of companies like beehiiv, who are clearly killing it. People are craving connection, and email newsletters are a powerful way to deliver personalized messages straight to the hearts (and inboxes!) of readers. 

Behind the scenes of email, things are evolving 

Speaking of nuance, there are other signs email is not just here to stay, but growing. You might even say it’s having a moment (again).  

And just like any relationship, email needs tending to keep the digital spark alive. 

Mailbox Providers are investing 

We’re talkin’ about increased financial investment by mailbox providers (MBPs) and email service providers (ESPs) in tools designed to make email better for senders and recipients alike. 

From the MBP side, this includes a very real shift to domain-based sender reputation indicators, enforcement of higher security standards to reach inboxes at Gmail and Yahoo, and continual improvements to popular email performance management tools like Google Postmaster Tools (which got a refresh in 2024) and the Yahoo Sender Hub.  

And let’s not forget Apple. They sorta got the ball rolling with Mail Privacy Protection (MPP) back in 2021. It was introduced to help protect users from having their activity tracked by marketers — which we can agree to love and hate at the same time. They’ve also introduced a tabbed mailbox experience a la Gmail. 

The point is, MBPs are investing in more granular, privacy-minded email performance monitoring. Their goal is to protect their users and enhance their mailbox experience. Those of us on the sending side of the equation need to embrace that same line of thinking as well, because we can surely expect to see more updates and changes from these providers as enforcement of higher security standards ramps up over time.  

Email service providers are investing 

On the ESP side of the house, things are firing on all cylinders. For marketers…Have you heard of Yotpo? Beehiiv? KLAVIYO? SOCKETLABS?! These companies are changing the way email is done, from design to delivery. In fact, Beehiiv is so buzzed up about it, they launched a multi-million dollar fund specifically designed to support journalists just a few months ago. 

Social media wants in 

People are stepping away from Facebook (or is it Meta now?) in droves, TikTok is on the proverbial chopping block in the United States, and X is…well, it is what it is, and that’s all we should say about that.

We’re not saying social media isn’t important — it is. And we’re not here to suggest email could be a drop-in replacement for it, either. But all that chaos and volatility makes email’s calm waters seem like a dream for those who don’t like risk.

In fact, within the last few months, the owner of one of these social platforms has shown interest in starting his own email service to rival the likes of Gmail, Yahoo, and the rest. Put another point up on the board for email.

AI has also entered the chat (errr, SMTP conversation?) 

We’d be nothin’ but ostriches with our heads in the sand if we didn’t acknowledge AI arriving on the scene (and in our inboxes!) in a big way in 2024. MBPs use it, ESPs use it, even our Spotlight email analytics platform has some AI baked in so senders can surface contextual email performance insights in 3 clicks or less.  

Regardless of how you feel about AI, it’s changing how we send and interact with mail every day. We’re not suggesting it’ll be replacing email jobs anytime soon, but it’s certainly shifting the focus from manual tasks and circular best practice conversations to more time spent playing 3D chess across email, SMS, push, direct mail (and any other channels their audiences prefer) just as easily as sitting criss cross, applesauce.  

As practitioners with a deep appreciation and understanding of email, we can either be at the forefront of this next digital wave, helping to shape it, or we can stay stuck with whatever non-email specialists and experts decide to build for us. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

At the very least, pay attention to what’s happening within AI. That’s all we’re sayin’. 

Evolution isn’t always simple — even when it’s a good thing 

Just like any good love story, email is constantly evolving. And while it’s simple to understand why email practitioners love our channel so much, it’s not exactly simple to put that love into daily practice.  

Why is it so challenging? A couple reasons… 

Domain reputation matters more than ever 

First and foremost, MBPs are more concerned about the domain-based reputation of individual senders today, which is not typically how ESPs have been optimized. Originally, performance monitoring, email routing rules and just about everything else about sender reputation management was IP-based. 

Without domain-specific rules in place to allow for easier optimization and analysis, senders with multiple domains can quickly get lost in deliverability “white noise”. The signals are there — and holy cow are there a lot of them! — but the context is missing, and the needle is soooo easily lost in the haystack.  

In today’s domain-based world, senders need to be able to identify which domain needs a glow-up (and why). It’s nearly impossible to stay ahead of problems and make meaningful change using email analytics and management tools from decades past. Which brings us to the next reason why evolution isn’t simple… 

Email provider technology isn’t keeping pace with all these changes 

We can thank Google and Yahoo for helping email platforms move out of the stone age in a mad dash to get their customers compliant with their bulk sender requirements (effective starting in Feb 2024). 

Since the initial shellshock has worn off, the industry has gotten behind the spirit of these changes — which is to make email a more secure and trusted channel for communicating with their users — we heard this directly from both mailbox providers during our webinar with Google and Yahoo last year.  

But a lot of folks in the industry feel as though they’ve now spent their credits and won’t get much attention from dev teams unless something urgent forces their hand. This puts ESP customers into a rough spot.  

Similar to the challenges we mentioned with identifying domain-based performance issues, how can you optimize delivery when one domain is being told to try again later (aka being temporarily deferred) and everybody else using that IP is stuck in line behind them? 

Short answer: you can’t. 

If you’ve ever been stuck in line behind someone when their credit card gets declined and they have to call the bank and troubleshoot before you’re able to buy a salty snack and a Gatorade for your road trip, you understand why this is a problem. It’s a lot of waiting around (and sometimes, giving up). 

Translated to email speak: essentially, the retry window for deferred messages gets super long and is closing before legitimate mail that’s been stuck in the queue has a chance to be delivered. This leads to legitimate, mailable addresses getting rejected (aka soft bounced) instead. 

And it’s something that’s actively happening with other ESPs. Here’s an example…  

What you’re seeing (below) is a high-volume sender of ours that sends mail through us and one other ESP for redundancy purposes. It’s the same traffic, just split up to go through both sets of pipes.  

Our Spotlight email analytics platform allows us to analyze performance across both providers in the same place, and what we’ve noticed is mail is being soft bounced at a much higher rate with the other ESP who is still using the old-fashioned one-line-to-the-mailbox route. Here’s a rundown of the changes we made to open “multiple checkout lines” about 10 months ago. 

The people getting emails delivered behind the scenes of these companies are just as stellar as they always were, but their tools need continual care and tweaking to maintain consistently optimal delivery — in some cases, it’s simply not happening. 

The role of email practitioners is changing 

As a community, we’ve made so much progress in getting businesses to know and care about email. Unfortunately, not everybody’s gotten on board yet, contributing to an email-specific talent drain at big ESPs over the past couple years. 

With email’s technical requirements getting more complex, email experts are needed now more than ever. We need people who understand data, and email. Folks who want to improve the email ecosystem, not morph it into a cold emailer’s dream or a lame-duck version of SMS.  

We’re lucky to have a seasoned team here at SocketLabs who bring combined decades (and sometimes individual decades) of expertise to our customers. We also host monthly customer-only office hours to ensure our users have a direct line of support from our team without requiring a formalized professional services engagement.

Even if you’re not a customer of ours, you can attend our monthly virtual roundtables to meet likeminded practitioners and crowdsource solutions to your biggest challenges — because they’re facing the same issue or have been there, done that, and are happy to share what they learned the hard way. 

Email’s future is very bright, and we couldn’t be more excited!

There are lots of email platforms and tools and email-lovin’ folks out there who are keeping up with all of these changes so their senders can stay on the leading edge. Data accuracy keeps getting fuzzier, but MBPs are being intentional about updating their own tooling to be as helpful as possible. LOVE to see it. 

Automation is more possible than ever thanks to intentional (and huge) investments into AI, and SMBs have more options for supercharging their email revenue than ever before, with feature after feature being rolled out consistently from those big partners we mentioned earlier: Kit, Squarespace, Shopify, Yotpo, Klaviyo, and smaller shops with more niche options for niche needs. 

We’re making intentional steps with our tooling here at SocketLabs, too. In response to the rapid innovation in email, we recognized the gap between email ops and email data, and the even bigger gap between most email folks and the rest of their organizations. Drawing on our email expertise, we developed an email analytics platform called Spotlight that uses reliable data, including your own delivery and engagement data, and insights from Google Postmaster Tools, to help you analyze, contextualize, and optimize performance.

ESPs and senders alike struggle with data challenges. Spotlight provides a direct solution, allowing our customers to consistently improve their performance with its insights. We are constantly analyzing the data we surface and developing new feature sets and options to put a giant spotlight (*WINK*) on issues hiding under cover. 

You can check out a little video about how SocketLabs Spotlight email analytics works today and if you’re curious to know more, let us know. There’s LOTS happening here we aren’t able to fit into this love letter to our dearest friend, Email. 

What would your love letter to email say? 

Email has been a constant in our lives, evolving with us and continuing to be a powerful force for connection. It’s not just a tool; it’s a vital connection. At SocketLabs, we’re passionate about helping you harness that power. Spotlight is designed to give you the insights and tools you need to navigate the ever-changing (and oh-so-exciting!) email landscape and build stronger relationships with your audience. 

We believe in the magic of email, and we feel blessed to have you as part of our #DearEmail story. Now, we want to hear from you! What do YOU love most about email?  

Share your own #DearEmail love letter on social media and tell the world why email is so special! You can use our love letter templates (square or wide), create your own, or simply just shout “I love email” loud and proud across social media. You do you…just remember to use the #DearEmail hashtag.  

If you need some inspiration, head over to our friend Al Iverson’s blog, and check out some letters posted on LinkedIn from Jaina Mistry, Andrew Bonar, and Anne Sophie Marsh. 

And while you’re at it, reach out! We’d love to show you how SocketLabs Spotlight email analytics platform can help you write even more successful email love stories…even if you’re not sending email through us.

We’re curious: How well can you track the performance of the many — hundreds, thousands! — of senders on your platform? Is it easy to proactively identify senders who might have email delivery problems, or is it more like trying to save a princess from a castle full of obstacles? 

With SocketLabs Spotlight’s newest feature set, our proprietary machine learning provides not only big-picture views for immediate visibility into problematic senders, but it also gives you already-calculated analysis on opportunities lost due to the nature of the sender’s problem in less than five clicks.

If you’re not a big blog reader, don’t worry. Here’s the TL;DR: Just watch this bad boy in action.

Go from 40,000 feet… 

Before we start showing off these machine learning (ML) capabilities, let’s look at the big picture we’re able to provide now that we’re powered by Snowflake. 

Imagine what you can do with a unified view of all your senders’ performance on one simple dashboard. Instead of navigating to individual accounts, spending 40 minutes pulling reports and analyzing them line by line to find an outlier — or worse, having to send another custom request to the dev team for that report you need — you can use SocketLabs Spotlight to sort all your subaccounts by the urgency of their needs. 

Looking at this view from StreamMonitor – which is but one click away after you log in — we can see this email service provider (ESP) has 861 customers, and 72 of those accounts have problems with either a High and Medium level of urgency.  

Where to start? Well, we can sort these subaccounts by issue count, urgency, or sending volume to see which accounts are experiencing the most urgent and impactful delivery issues. 

Looks like Donut Planet has 14 issues, but is only Medium urgency. This means those issues could cause performance damage, but not imminently. Let’s look for a bigger fish to fry first. 

Such as Dealz 4 You, which has a slightly lower issue count, but a High urgency indicator, suggesting this account is heading south and the impact to delivery has become critical. This is the best place to start our day to protect our platform’s (and customer’s) sender reputation.  

Typically, when you have hundreds of customers (who may have 100’s of sending domains or subaccounts of their own), it’s simply not possible to get an overview like this. You’d need to build a custom data warehouse to ingest all the data, which takes years and lots of money to do. Then you’d have to sit a business intelligence tool on top of it to actually analyze the data in a way that’s meaningful. Oh, let’s not forget, you need to get this internal project prioritized on the product roadmap over features that benefit the customers. NBD.  

That’s a lot of investment into an internal reporting feature that, let’s be honest: probably isn’t what you asked for and isn’t giving you nearly enough insight…if you can even trust what you’re seeing. 

Or you’ll need to run an individual query or report for each sender. Who has time for that? You certainly don’t. Which is why Spotlight guides you to the senders with the most impactful issues within a few clicks, so you can focus on what matters most: helping them fix the problem! 

…Down into to a Narrower View of Subaccount Performance… 

Alright, it’s time to jump into the machine-learning layer! Finally! 

Once you’ve identified a sender in need of a closer look, you can go into the next level of detail — right on the same dashboard – by simply clicking on the subaccount you’d like to learn more about. 

Understand what’s driving a sender’s issue…no spreadsheets required. 

Other email analytics platforms can give you raw data that can indicate a problem with hygiene. But at SocketLabs, you’ll see clearly there is a problem with list hygiene without even thinking about raw data, because our machine learning algorithms surfaced nine issues related to hygiene alone. 

Notice, too, in the lower right corner: This sender is considered High urgency because SocketLabs Spotlight’s detected a significant and unexpected change in performance. 

SocketLabs Spotlight surfaces anomalies in individual performance. This insight is not derived from an industry benchmark or best guess. You know just as well as we do: this is huge, folks. 

This sender’s unique performance during the last few sends is significantly lower than their previous performance. This is contextual information you can use to alert your sender of a growing issue. 

Spotlight can even tell you which provider(s) a sender is having issues with, so you don’t have to spend time digging through logs to figure out which mailbox providers (MBPs) are destinations of concern. 

Dive into diagnostic investigations…right within the UI. 

Speaking of logs, though…we know some of you enjoy digging into the details. It’s your happy place. We’ve got you covered there, too.  

Within just a few clicks, you can access a variety of reports, directly within the UI:  

• Delivered & Failed Message Summary reports 
• Complaints report, visualizing the top Mx’s where spam complaints have been reported for better trend-spotting. 
• Engagement Tracking
• Message Detail, zooming in to see what’s happened with each individual email that’s been sent – including the failure reason you need to request mitigation with a provider, and so much more. Bye, bye, Kibana! We’ll miss you (…sort of, not really).  

We should also mention there are near-endless ways to slice and dice your data.  

Reports can be sorted by Mx / mailbox provider, From domain, DKIM domain, IP address, MailingID, Hourly, SuperTags, and the external provider (such as SendGrid or Mailgun) if you use multiple. 

You can also filter by StreamScore, issue urgency, and volume to ensure you’re looking at the exact data set you need at any given moment. 

Got a report you’d like to share or a set of customers you need to check regularly? We feel that. All reports can be saved for later and/or shared with stakeholders. 

Automate Actions to Proactively Manage (and Protect!) Sender Reputation 

You can also use this information operationally. Noticing you have a handful of senders who are struggling with the same issue, or are performing worse than usual and you’re growing concerned about collateral damage? Gather like-senders and route them into an IP or pool with senders with similar performance so you can better protect your best senders from performance issues caused by others who are struggling. 

For even faster implementation, our Rule Engine tool lets you set thresholds based on things like StreamScore so you can automate re-routing when someone drops below your ideal score for the IP or pool’s reputation. You don’t even have to manually monitor for those anomalies and instead can set-and-relax rules to ensure anything approaching problematic behavior is routing appropriately to avoid damage proactively. 

…to Instant Impact Analysis at a Granular View. 

Remember how we said you can get to deep detail in just three clicks? Here we are. 

Say goodbye to tedious math and human error, compounded by the need to pull disparate reports on different sends at different times. Spotlight’s new machine learning feature instantly surfaces key insights you can bring to your sender to illustrate the severity of their issues. 

Each issue will be brought to your attention clearly, so you can see the amount of lost opportunity at every turn, for every one of your senders. These aren’t generalizations or bulk numbers for you to dig into deeper or investigate exactly where those bounces came from… 

It’s all right here for you to either pass on to your sender to justify the need to act, or take action yourself, depending on the severity of the issue you’re seeing. 

Let’s Shape the Future of Email Analytics, Together 

Remember when we asked what you thought you’d see in email in 2025? Overwhelmingly, people shared how they were ready to use AI in a way that made email performance easier to understand and optimize.  

We were ready, too, so why wait until 2025? 

One of the best parts of this machine learning feature of StreamMonitor is how flexible it is, which opens the door to so many more potential views, reports, and dashboards we can build to bring you exactly what it is you need to help your senders succeed. 

We’re currently looking for partners to help us collaborate on what those views are; interested in helping us make the future of email analytics even more powerful?  

If you send via SendGrid or Mailgun, or you want to switch to SocketLabs email, let’s talk and see how we can build it together. 

Rather jump right in? You can try Spotlight analytics free for 30 days. Tell us what works, what needs work, and what features we can build to make your senders (and your role!) more effective.  

Hi there! Happy to see you here for another edition of Email Performance Red Flags. We’ll be digging deeeep into bounces and delivery rates today, so if you need the info in a faster, more condensed version, go ahead and check out our Survival Kit. 

It’s a PDF with the top warning signals, best advice, and exclusive content not found here in the blogs. It’s got a checklist-style layout that’s great for quick reference, so grab one for yourself. 

But you’re here now, so let’s get into the topic at hand… 

Today’s Red Flags: High Bounces and Low Delivery Rates 

There are so many reasons for why these red flags might start waving in your general direction. Issues with list collection or management, authentication, spam complaints, and more. All fair game. 

And while both of these topics deserve their day in the sun, we decided to group them together because you can’t have one without the other. Bounces go up, delivery rates go down. It’s like a seesaw, but a lot less fun. 

Today’s Email Experts 

But first! Let’s introduce our special guest experts for today. 

Tara Natanson is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to just about everything email delivery and compliance, including figuring out what to do when weird stuff happens. Tara is currently approaching her 20th anniversary at Constant Contact as their Manager ISP Relations, and she’s been a co-chair for the M3AAWG Senders Committee for more than 15 years! 

Jennifer Nespola Lantz has been in the email ecosystem for more than 15 years, having worked at Acxiom Impact and Zeta Global before taking on her current role as VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability for Kickbox. She’s a trusted source of information (and fun conference pal!), thanks to her knack for bringing email folks together across company lines via the Kickbox Blog. Also check out her personal blog called ISKTBK (“I should know this by now”).  

Mary Youngblood has nearly 25 years of email security, compliance, and deliverability experience, making her an absolutely stellar source of email knowledge. She started her career at EarthLink/Mindspring back in the days of Dial-Up and today she is a Campaign Abuse Desk Compliance Manager at Adobe. From working with law enforcement to put identity thieves in prison to giving her best advice to folks trying to send good email, she is a well-rounded email expert here to help us all. 

Clearly we’re in great hands for this topic. Time to get started. 

What’s a High Bounce Rate (or Low Delivery Rate)? 

Let’s say you typically send 100 emails, and usually all 100 are delivered successfully. Congrats! Things are going really well. 

But on Tuesday, you noticed 98 were delivered and two hard bounced. OK, that’s not so bad, let’s just remove those two addresses. 

Wednesday rolls around and you delivered 50 emails and 48 bounced, with a combination of hard and soft codes.  

Something’s definitely goin’ on: you’re seeing a wildly waving email performance red flag! Two, actually. Because when your bounce rate goes up, your delivery rate goes down. 

So, let’s look at why this could be happening and how to get your email delivery train back on the tracks. Note that we’ll mostly be talking about bounces from here on out…just remember, a high bounce rate = low delivery rate. 

What’s Considered “High”? 

Here’s everyone’s favorite answer: IT DEPENDS. 

As a quick reminder, hard bounces are permanent failures (e.g. invalid addresses) and soft bounces are temporary failures. The tricky thing with soft bounce is sometimes they’re caused by something as simple as a mailbox provider’s servers being overloaded at the moment. Other times, they’re a clue you’re having issues with your reputation. 

A high bounce rate is any upward deviation from what you consider your “standard” bounce rate. If you typically bounce 2% of your mail and suddenly bounce much more, your bounce rate should be considered “high”, particularly if there were no major changes to your list or collection practices. 

The other side to this coin is your delivered rate. So, a marked decrease in your average delivery rate should be considered “low,” even if you have an objectively good delivery rate. Any noticeable downward motion in your delivery rate is concerning. 

Let’s stick with bounces for the rest of this though.  

Mary says, “If a sender sends regularly to their entire list, the Hard Bounce rate should be close to 0. If it suddenly goes over 0.1%, something has likely changed or broken.”  

Yes, you read that right. Mary’s working with some very large-scale senders, and if they’re noticing even a 0.1% change in hard bounces, that “tiny” increase could be an early warning sign that something’s wrong. 

This is not to say you need to have a 0% bounce rate all the time. 

“In general, if I’m seeing a 1.5% bounce rate or below, things are looking good,” says Jen. “2% isn’t necessarily bad. 3% may not be either, depending on the stream and how well it’s designed and protected. But beyond that, as we start to go beyond 2%, I start to ask questions.” 

 Have a higher bounce rate than that? Keep breathing. It really depends on your personal circumstances, and what’s happening with the (hundreds of) other factors that can influence deliverability. 

What are the Consequences of High Bounces and Low Delivery? 

We probably don’t need to explicitly tell you this, but we will anyway: The impact on your business could be immense.  

“This can be a domino effect that is hard to recover from quickly. One bad metric causes another, that impacts reputation, that causes another, that impacts inbox placement, that causes another,” stresses Mary. 

A few dominos you’ll want to watch for: 

• If you have high bounces and low delivery, your email is clearly not reaching your intended recipients. If those emails are critical, like password resets or order confirmations, you’ll frustrate recipients, which can erode trust in your brand very quickly. 

• The more hard bounces you generate by sending to invalid addresses, the more likely mailbox providers are gonna be to start soft bouncing your mail. This means you’re not able to reach the valid email addresses on your list.  

• If you drive business through email and they’re not being delivered to potential customers, you’ll lose out on important revenue typically attributed to the email channel. A decreased ROI could mean the business sees less opportunity in the email channel than they used to, leading to less resources or bargaining power for your department. 

Plus, the consequences could compound over time depending on the reason you’re seeing low delivery. 

“I’ve seen alarms ring all the way up to the CEO of each company when bounces are occurring and the ones that are the most concerning are the ones due to blocks, often the result of a Spamhaus listing,” says Jen. “In those cases, it’s important to remain calm and start researching immediately. Explain the situation and make sure both parties are being transparent.”  

What Can Cause a High Bounce Rate? 

A LOT of things. Unfortunately, the reasons vary. Some are quickly resolved where others will take much more time to recover from. 

These are the most common root causes:  

Dirty lists.  

This might be a problem with how you collect email addresses (e.g. lack of permission, problems with data entry at the point of signup, lead magnets that don’t align with the emails you send), or it could be due to a list that’s been mismanaged (e.g. not removing addresses that hard bounced, sending to addresses you haven’t contacted in more than 6-12 months). 

Problem-causing shared IP senders negatively impacting the reputation of others.  

While this isn’t necessarily an “easy” fix, you have options that do not require a full overhaul of how you “do email.” Consider asking your ESP if you can be moved to a different shared IP with similarly good senders like you, using a dedicated IP, migrating ESPs, or splitting traffic to a different, additional provider, all of which can help you improve your delivery rate. 

Becoming blocklisted by a reputable provider.  

The good news: when bounces specifically mention you’re on a blocklist, there’s normally a link to where you can find out more about what’s driving the issue or request a delisting. For example:  

• 550 5.7.1 Your email was rejected due to having a domain present in the Spamhaus DBL — see https://www.spamhaus.org/dbl/ 
• 550 5.7.1 Service unavailable; client [x.xx.xx.xx] blocked using Cloudmark Sender Intelligence (Visit http://csi.cloudmark.com/reset-request/ if you feel this is in error) 

When you’re listed, follow those links mentioned in the bounce response (or get to Googlin’) to understand what’s driving the listing: typically user complaints and/or spam trap hits. If you can’t tell what’s triggered the listing based on a quick search, contact your ESP or the blocklist provider directly for help. 

At SocketLabs, our email analytics tool called Spotlight shows your performance at the provider-level and also crunches the data provided by 3rd party data feeds helping us help you identify issues with high bounce rates (aka low delivery rates). If a listing is actively causing your mail to be blocked, you’ll know about it.  

In fact, you’ll even know approximately how many recipients it’s affecting…in Maia’s Treats’ case, it’s almost 16k recipients! 

If you find yourself on a reputable blocklist, you need to actively pursue delisting but note, you should never, ever pay anyone money to remove you from a blocklist. Those ones aren’t reputable, and they’re not the reason your mail is being blocked, I promise. 

Poor sending practices resulting in a low sender reputation. 

If you’re on a blocklist, you can assume this is the reason you’re on it to begin with. If you’re using bad email practices, your sender reputation is probably in the pits.  

Reasons you have a poor reputation could include: 

• Sending to addresses without first having their clear and direct consent, triggering negative engagement from recipients (most notably, spam complaints). 

• Failing to protect signup forms with a CAPTCHA (or similar solution) to prevent bot signups, increasing the likelihood of hard bounces and/or spam trap hits, among other problems. 

• Blasting to full lists without segmentation or personalization, leading to a lack of positive engagement (and potentially, unsubscribes or spam complaints). 

• Making it hard to unsubscribe or worse, not honoring unsubscribe requests. This one’s bad for your bounce rates, and illegal in just about every region of the world. 

• An email strategy prioritizing short-term growth over long-term quality and engagement. 

Since we’re lucky enough to have the collected experience of some incredible experts, we asked them what the most unusual reason was for someone’s abysmal delivery rates…you won’t believe what Tara reported. 

“As an ESP we send on behalf of many different customers. One day I received a support escalation from an angry mail administrator at a small mailbox provider who claimed that one of my customers had harvested their entire email directory and was spamming it,” shares Tara.  

“As a result, they were blocking our servers indefinitely. It turns out that a different department at the same provider had decided to use our service to mail the entire user base their informational updates, but no one had told the IT department. This is probably not as rare as one would expect.”  

If we’ve said it once, we’ve said it a thousand times: Always monitor your email metrics! There could be serious consequences of activities going on that you didn’t even realize were happening. 

At SocketLabs, we make monitoring easy by providing all your key metrics like delivery rates, opens, clicks, and more directly on your dashboard.  

We also crunch all those numbers (plus a bunch more) and provide you with a StreamScore helping you identify issues quickly so you can make changes before the crash. Note how the sender below saw a small dip in performance, took action, and then saw their email performance improve. Love to see it!  

Mary gave us even more potential reasons why emails bounce, ranging from things that are temporary to permanent. 

• Blocklistings, either by the ISP specifically, or as a result of a listing by a blocklist used by multiple mailbox providers. 
• Spikes in spam complaints, caused by not following best practices. 
• Mailing old data or previously suppressed users (e.g. former hard bouncers, spam complainers, and opt outs.) 
• Unexpected contacts (where the sender is promoting unrecognized items (co-branding)). 
• Sending from an unfamiliar “Friendly From.” 

Temporary vs Permanent Bounces, Soft vs Hard: Let’s Break It Down 

As I’m sure you’re seeing, there are a lot of reasons why emails don’t get delivered. Some are in your control while others are out of your hands. The email life ain’t easy. 

Let’s start with “temporary” issues, where you’ll see soft bounces. 

Soft Bounces 

Soft bounces will generally resolve, because the email addresses you’re trying to contact do exist. The question is whether those bounces are in your control to fix, and how quickly they’ll resolve! 

When Soft Bounces Are Outside Your Control 

Sometimes the bounce has nothing to do with you. For example, if the mailbox provider is having server issues preventing them from accepting mail, you’ll see a bounce response saying something like, “please try again later”. While it’s frustrating to not be able to fix this problem yourself, you’ll typically be able to send successfully on your next attempt a few minutes later. 

Another issue you might encounter is when a recipient’s user account is out of storage, leading to a bounce mentioning the user being “over quota.” For example, Google’s storage plans allow users 100 GB of data across Google Photos, Google Drive, and Gmail. If they’re reaching the upper limits or their plan and upload a ton of photos or large files, that could mean their email address isn’t accepting email while they sort things out. 

When Soft Bounces Are Within Your Control 

In other cases, soft bounces are the result of something you’ll need to improve upon. 

Lighter Lifts to Fix 

Sometimes it’s an early warning sign you’re about to experience more deliverability problems very soon. We’ve seen this from Google and Yahoo quite a bit as they continue to roll out enforcement of their bulk sender requirements. 

They’ll temporarily defer the mail on the first attempt, giving the sender a heads up about why the mail wasn’t successfully accepted, and then deliver the mail when the ESP automatically retries sending. For example… 

• 421 4.7.32 This mail has been rate limited because there is no DMARC alignment. 

Rate limiting or throttling can also happen when you’re sending lots of mail and there is some concern you might be spamming. As you can see in this (pretty hilarious) bounce message Tara shared with us from her event logs, mailbox providers are less gentle when you’re flooding their servers with messages: 

• 450 4.2.0 <EMAIL>: Recipient address rejected: Hold your horses slick, you are coming on too strong. Try again in a few minutes and maybe you will get lucky. 

We talk more about temporary soft bounces in our blog on deferrals, but basically, if you don’t sort out the issue mailbox providers are pointing out before they ultimately deliver your messages successfully, they will start to reject your mail (aka: soft bounce it). 

Heavier Lifts to Fix 

When the mail is fully rejected, the soft bounces are usually driven by larger issues with sender reputation. For example, if the failure message says something along the lines of “message flagged as spam”, you may have generated a high rate of spam complaints on past sends, or you may be blocklisted because you’re hitting spam traps (or both, FUN). 

What was one of the strangest reasons Mary saw recipients react negatively to mail, resulting in a high bounce rate? 

“Senders deciding a personal touch will work well by changing the Friendly From from the company name to an employee name,” recalls Mary. Why?   

“Many mail clients now display only the friendly tag and not the from address, unless moused over. So, the end user may be accustomed to seeing ‘Company’ as the friendly tag out in front of the email. When they see ‘John Doe’ and do not mouse over to see the address behind the tag, they may instantly assume SPAM and report it.”   

And if you do decide to change your friendly From address, be sure it’s incredibly clear that ‘John Doe’ is associated with your brand or give recipients a heads up that mail will come from a different sender before making any changes. 

Though reputation-driven bounces might not feel temporary, they will resolve as long as you find the root cause and do whatever is needed to solve the problem. We’ll get into how you can do that in the next section. But first, let’s talk about… 

Hard Bounces 

A hard bounce is a permanent failure stemming from sending to an address that either doesn’t exist or doesn’t accept mail. It will not resolve on its own. 

Hard bounces are viewed negatively by mailbox providers because they indicate your address collection or list management processes are lacking. So, it’s important to monitor closely and keep hard bounce rates low. 

“I usually look at high bounces with more urgency than a dip in opens, for example. Bounces are direct communications with mailbox providers,” says Jen. “There could be legitimate reasons for the high bounce rate, but my first rule of thumb is, if your mail isn’t accepted, that is a cause for concern.” 

What causes hard bounces?  

Usually, it’s bad data.  

Maybe your list includes old addresses that haven’t been sent to in months (…years??). Perhaps those old addresses turned into spam traps and now every time you mail to them, you’re sending a signal to MBPs and spam trap operators alike saying you’re not paying attention to recipient experience and data hygiene.  

“High bounce rates could be due to poor list quality. Your collection methods need to be reviewed and improved. That could include form submissions. If your form isn’t protected, you might be getting hit with a bot attack,” explains Jen. “The sooner you can understand the issue, the faster you can remedy it. The longer you don’t, the more likely you are just reaffirming you’re not a trusted sender.” 

You could even see a spike in hard bounces after testing something that feels innocent! Such as adding a new lead magnet that brings in lots of signups but doesn’t require submitters to validate their email address before receiving the discount, so lots of people have been adding bogus addresses. Ouch. 

If you’re scared, don’t be. Even “permanent” failures are a learning tool, because they allow you to know exactly where improvement is needed. 

Plus, you don’t have to live in Bounce Land forever! So, let’s talk about how you can make your bounce situation temporary instead of an (email) death sentence. 

How to Solve (and AVOID!) Low Delivery and High Bounce Rates 

Surely by this point in the blog you’ve seen some trends: data quality, consent, monitoring performance, and so on…But we wouldn’t leave you hanging without suggestions for both solving this problem when it arises and preventing it from rearing its ugly lil’ head in the first place. 

Let’s focus on swerving problems entirely before talking about how to clean them up. 

Avoiding High Bounces and Low Delivery Rates 

Get Permission 

There was one common piece of advice from all our contributors, which Tara summed up oh-so-well: the importance of getting consent! 

Yuuuup! There ya go. Frustratingly simple, I know.  

But getting permission and setting expectations at the point of signup will help ensure you’re collecting valid addresses from folks who actually intend to engage positively with your emails. 

“If you start by making sure the user giving you an email address understands what they are doing, who you are, your offering, and what they get in return for a legitimate address (say a coupon), you will reduce the potential for them to add in busted addresses to move to the next step,” explains Jen. “Proper consent also reduces the chances users will behave in a negative way because they are asking to receive your content.” 

Authenticate Your Mail 

Google and Yahoo’s new sender requirements now require a valid DMARC record, which also means your SPF and/or DKIM records need to be present and properly aligned. Check out our SPF and DKIM blogs to ensure you have up-to-date information. 

Once you’re good with those, you’ll be ready to add your DMARC record. We published the steps you need to take to publish a compliant record, and you can find those right here.  

It can be trickier for ESPs and similarly complex providers to ensure your senders are properly authenticated, which is why our StreamScore monitors multiple aspects of email performance, including authentication status, hard and soft bounce details, recipient engagement, and mailbox provider feedback, and more. 

Then, of course, you need to be following best practices.  

We could spend hours talking to you about those, so in the interest of time and staying on track, here is a list of our top pieces of advice. 

• Always get consent to email before actually emailing people. 
• Honor peoples’ requests to unsubscribe 
• Use segmentation to make sure you’re sending relevant email  
• Personalize email to further prove your mail is relevant and increase the likelihood of good engagement 
• Attempt to re-engage addresses with low engagement, then sunset (remove) addresses if you can’t get them to engage. 
• Remove addresses that hard bounce the first time they hard-bounce 
• Monitor your performance: Get as granular as possible. Look at delivery rates at your most important mailbox providers to make sure you’re aware of any delivery fluctuations before you get to a point where you consider it “low delivery” 
• Periodically and proactively check to see if you’re listed on reputable blocklists 

Mary has this incredibly important point to make:  

“Mail regularly, but mail with a purpose that is relative to the user but not so much that the user becomes numb to the message. Don’t go back to old data; let it go. They don’t want your mail, it’s ok.” 

It is OK! You would much rather have someone amicably unsubscribe to your mail than angrily mark it as spam because they don’t understand why you’re messaging them.  

Mary also shared really practical advice to follow, saying “Don’t send attachments. Don’t send huge, image-filled emails that are so large that they fill up a user’s inbox. Keep your friendly from consistent, because change causes confusion. Process your hard bounces, DBLs and opt-outs right away.” 

Check, check, check, and check, Mary! 

Resolving High Bounce and Low Delivery Rates 

So, avoidance measures didn’t cut it this time. You have high bounces and low delivery. What should you do next?  

Understand What’s Wrong 

“Find out WHY you are bouncing,” stresses Jen. “That is probably the most difficult part for senders. If you don’t have the bounce reason (not the category, but the reason) that looks something like ‘550 5.7.1 Explanatory text here,’ it’s hard to determine why you are bouncing and how to fix it.” 

First and foremost, look at as many bounce logs as you can. They should give you some direction, even if it isn’t explicit. Some will tell you very specifically what’s wrong, some won’t. Just keep an eye on them to see if you can identify a core issue. 

Tara’s advice was similar, sharing, “To fix any bounce issue, you need to understand the cause, so my best advice is to use a system that helps you parse your bounces into more than just ‘hard’ and ‘soft.’  Being able to see the raw bounces and analyze the data is priceless. Were the bounces all at a single ISP? Were the bounce messages all the same? Is this a new issue or has it been ongoing for a while? The answer to all of these questions is buried in the data, so the best thing you can do is make sure you have access to it.” 

We’re on the same page here at SocketLabs, which is why our analytics platform offers a variety of reports dedicated to delivered messages, spam complaints, engagement tracking, and you guessed it: failed messages! 

You can even see the detail for every message sent, all the way down to the JSON event. Super handy for finding the raw bounce messages with reasons that Tara and Jen just mentioned!  

This is what allows you to not only understand what went wrong, but also gives you the details you need to request mitigation with the provider (assuming you’ve taken care of any problems on your side). 

Having access to raw bounce data isn’t just helpful, it’s also hilarious! Look at these passionate bounces Tara and her colleagues have been collecting over time… 

• 550 5.1.1 what are you doing man 
• 451 4.7.1 Please try again later – are you for real? 
• 550 5.1.1 Begone, felonious crook. You embarrass the [redacted] party. 
• 571 5.0.0 [name redacted] has passed, you will need a Ouija board to contact them 

L. O. L.  

I’d be happy to share funny bounces with you all day (and please, if you have some of your own, share them with me!!) but for now, let’s move on. 

Take Action On What You Learn! 

Here are some immediate steps to take once you have an idea of what could be causing your issues: 

• Confirm your ESP actually sent the mail! Investigate if there is an ESP problem that’s out of your hands, like an outage or other issue the ESP needs to resolve on their own. 

• Confirm your authentication (particularly DMARC configuration) is correct. 

• Remove any hard bounces you still have on your lists. 

• Review your list collection and maintenance practices to identify any that could be negatively impacting your sender reputation. For example, collecting lots of typo’d addresses that lead to hard bounces, or not collecting consent at all! Trace those issues back to the source and fix ‘em, pronto. 

• Identify blocklistings that are impacting delivery: determine if they’re from reputable providers (like these!), understand what’s driving them (typically spam complaints are spam trap hits), fix what’s broken on your side (if anything), then work to get delisted. 

• Consider moving away from a shared IP strategy, if you are not using a dedicated IP. Other senders could be negatively impacting you. 

When all else fails, or if you’re not confident you can handle this situation on your own, consider this suggestion from Mary: “When possible, have a Deliverability expert help you; either one that is provided by your ESP or an industry consultant with years of experience.   

Far too often do we see senders who think they can fix a deliverability problem on their own, only to stir up additional problems that require even more work to dig out of the hole. Not only can these problems be complex, but they sometimes require some networking between deliv experts and their counterparts at mailbox providers to get reputations reset, IPs de-listed, and filters adjusted to truly resolve a problem completely.” 

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves, Mary. If you feel like you’re in too deep, you likely are. So, reach out for help…starting with contacting your ESP to see what they recommend. 

It Opened Up My Eyes, I Saw the Sign!  

If there was a certification for being a bounces red-flag spotter, you’d probably be qualified by now. 

If you want even more information like this, you have a couple of options:  

1. Our long-form explorations into some of the most common but damaging email performance problems, including high (or low) spam complaint rates, high unsubscribes, low open rates, or low click-through rates. These are in-depth explanations into what to do when you spot a red flag, including lots of examples and quotes from industry experts to give you a full look at the issue. 

2. More of a grab-and-go type? We’ve packaged up the best bits of advice from our guest experts into a PDF “Survival Kit” with the top warning signals, knowledge, and tips from the whole Email Performance Red Flags series and distilled down into easy-to-reference lists. When you’re monitoring your email performance, it’s the perfect companion to make sure you’re covering all your bases. 

That’s it for now, but we’ll be back with an issue on BLOCKLISTINGS soon. See you then! 

All eyes have been on DMARC since Google and Yahoo announced their intention to require DMARC on all mail in late 2023. Six months past when those rules went into effect (in February 2024), we’re now noticing higher levels of enforcement within our data, suggesting the grace period for senders late to the game is approaching a close.  

It’s time for bulk senders to truly get serious about implementing DMARC if they haven’t yet, and making sure the DMARC record applied on the mail is working appropriately. 

The biggest problem is: DMARC is hard! Like, really hard! Not only is it a complex thing to understand, it’s an even more confusing thing to monitor. That’s why we linked up with our friend Seth Blank, Chief Technology Officer at Valimail to explain what you need to know. 

Below you’ll find a full webinar recording of Brian Godiksen, SocketLabs’ Director of Customer Solutions, and Seth discussing the current state of DMARC: what it is, how to use it, why you need to use it, and what tools are available to help you succeed. The session was moderated by Lauren Meyer, chief marketing officer at SocketLabs. 

We’ll also give you a breakdown of the conversation in a “greatest hits” blog under the list of video highlights, complete with clips and takeaways you can refer back to. 

Let’s jump in! 

Overview & Fast Takeaways 

What is DMARC? 

DMARC stands for “Domain-based message authentication, reporting, and conformance.”  

It’s designed to look for aligned email authentication standards and then tells the mailbox provider receiving the mail what to do with it.  

So, if the mail passes authentication checks (like SPF and DKIM), the DMARC record will instruct the receiver to deliver the mail. If the mail does not pass authentication, the DMARC policy will then indicate what should happen next. 

What DMARC Policies are Available? 

There are three policies. 

1. P=none tells the MBP to do whatever they choose to do with the mail if it fails, because the policy is just meant to observe what is and is not passing authentication. If your DMARC policy includes an email address where you can receive reports, you’ll be alerted when authenticate checks fail.  

2. P=quarantine instructs the provider to accept the mail into their servers, but keep it away from the inbox. So, potentially a spam folder or other quarantined area of recipients’ mailboxes. 

3. P=reject is the strictest policy, where the sender is instructing the MBP outright reject any email failing authentication. 

While the domain owner is the one who sets the DMARC policy, it’s important to note that MBPs are the ones who ultimately decide what gets delivered to recipient inboxes. If they feel the mail is wanted by the recipient (based on past behavior), they have been known to override the DMARC policy in an effort to do what they think is best for their users. 

So, think of your DMARC policy as more of a suggestion from senders to MBPs than a mandate that will be carried out each and every time. 

What are the Benefits of DMARC? 

We’ll let the experts take this one on! The TL;DR is, “Once you have DMARC in place, you have greater control over your sender reputation.” 

Don’t forget, though: The security benefit of DMARC really only begins when you’re at a level of enforcement.  

If you’re only using p=none, you are simply monitoring and not taking any action when authentication fails. Giving yourself a better opportunity to catch an issue via a report, is great, but your goal should be actively instructing MBPs to quarantine or bounce unauthorized mail. 

Why is DMARC Required Now? 

The overall goal is to increase the security of the entire email ecosystem, especially after email became such a huge tool for businesses during the 2020 pandemic – that boom also came with a boom of malicious email attackers. So, Google and Yahoo’s DMARC requirement is a great step toward better protecting both senders and users. 

We should note, while this is only firmly required by major mailbox for bulk senders distributing at least 5,000 emails per day we recommend DMARC for everyone because of the benefits mentioned earlier. 

DMARC Adoption Rates 

Seth pulled some cool facts to illustrate the impact of the DMARC requirement on the email ecosystem:  

• DMARC adoption grew 55% between January 1 and March 31, 2024. 

• 75% of domains using DMARC are at p=none without any reporting. 

• This is a bad idea! You always want to know if you have gaps in security so you can close them ASAP. 

• Only 3% of domains with a DMARC policy are at enforcement. 

What Happens Without DMARC Now? 

Before, the risk of not using DMARC or having improperly (or missing) authentication was more about protecting reputation and reducing risk. Senders without a DMARC policy at a level of enforcement are at greater risk of being compromised, and as such, at a greater risk for reputation damage and deliverability issues. 

At Google and Yahoo, they’ll simply stop delivering mail without DMARC. Period. 

Seth and Brian shared a graph looking at a dedicated IP’s reputation at Google Postmaster Tools (GPT) from January to nearly May 2024. When DMARC wasn’t required and they did not have it in place, they had a good reputation until the requirement was enforced. The IP’s reputation quickly dropped from good to poor upon Google’s enforcement of DMARC, meaning they likely also saw some serious delivery issues during that period. When they realized what was happening, they implemented DMARC on April 3. Within 30 days, the reputation improved from poor to good. 

The damage is real, but quick recovery is possible. The key is to make sure you’re paying attention to your reputation to detect problems quickly so you can solve immediately. 

How Do You Read DMARC Reports? 

As they mentioned, DMARC reports are XML and that’s meant for computers, not humans. You’ll also get them from up to hundreds of places, so they can become overwhelming pretty quickly. 

However, it’s extremely important for you to look at and understand your reports to know whether messages from your domain pass DMARC.  

In general, though, these are the three most important things you can get from your reports: 

1. The number of messages sent from a single IP address for the report time period  

2. The SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication results for the messages  

3. Any actions taken by the receiving server (aka the MBP), for example accepting unauthenticated messages because they passed ARC authentication 

We highly recommend using a third-party service like Valimail to help you manage your XML reports so what you’re analyzing looks more like that pretty little summary on the left, instead of trying to interpret a message like the one on the left for each and every failure (yuck!).

How Do You Monitor DMARC Compliance? 

You have a few options to help you understand how your DMARC is working. Google developed a compliance page in GPT to make this super easy. 

And generally, you can monitor your reputation at Google and Yahoo using something like SocketLabs Spotlight or simply by using GPT.  

If you notice you have issues and you know you don’t use DMARC, surprise! You’re suffering the consequences. If you have issues but you thought your DMARC was solid, and you can’t identify other things that may be causing a slip in your reputation, you might want to consider a service like Valimail to help you sort everything out. 

SocketLabs customers have a quick way to monitor your authentication status and your reputation (via StreamScore) all in the same place. 

I Need DMARC Help. 

You are far from alone! DMARC is difficult and there are a bunch of resources out there to help you.  

We highly recommend starting your journey at Valimail, where they have a ton of free resources to guide you as far as you feel comfortable going on your own.  

When you’re ready to monitor your overall authentication and its impact on your performance, or if you need a quick and simple solution to set up your DKIM and SPF because that’s where your DMARC problems really live, SocketLabs makes authenticating a step-by-step guided process to take all the guesswork out. 

Whatever your needs may be, reach out to us and we can help you find the solution you need.