Email Deliverability: Why Your Emails Aren't Reaching the Inbox

Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo score every sender on engagement history, authentication, and complaint rates — then route accordingly. Your email platform's reputation helps, but since Gmail's 2024 sender requirements, your own domain reputation is the dominant factor. You are the sender of record, not MailerLite or GetResponse.

These three DNS records prove your emails are really from you. Since February 2024, Google and Yahoo effectively require all three for bulk senders — unauthenticated mail is increasingly rejected outright, not just filtered. Every platform in our reviews provides the exact records to paste into your DNS; it's a 20-minute job with permanent upside.

Check your status free with a mail-tester tool or your platform's built-in domain checker. If DMARC shows 'none' or missing, stop reading and fix it now — nothing else on this page matters until that's done.

Every send to a chronically inactive subscriber hurts you: low engagement teaches Gmail your mail is ignorable. Run a quarterly win-back; remove or suppress anyone who doesn't respond. A 5,000-subscriber list with 60% engagement out-delivers a 15,000 list with 20% engagement — and reaches more actual humans.

Sudden volume spikes trigger filters: if you normally send weekly to 2,000 and suddenly blast 20,000 imported contacts, expect throttling. Warm up volume gradually (double at most week over week), keep a consistent cadence, and never send to addresses older than your last engagement confirmation.

Spam complaint rate is the killer metric: Gmail requires it under 0.3%, and you should treat 0.1% as your real ceiling. Monitor it in Google Postmaster Tools (free) alongside your domain reputation. Also watch bounce rate (keep under 2%) — high bounces signal stale data and erode trust fast.

Content matters less than reputation, but it still matters: balance image-to-text ratio, avoid URL shorteners, skip spam-trigger formatting (ALL CAPS subject lines, excessive exclamation points), and always include a plain-text version. None of these rescue a bad reputation; all of them polish a good one.

Shared IPs (the default) are fine — usually better — below ~50,000 emails per month, because your platform's pool carries established reputation. Above that volume, a dedicated IP (available on GetResponse MAX, Moosend+, AWeber Unlimited) gives you full control over your own reputation — with full responsibility for warming it up.