Email deliverability is how reliably your messages reach recipients' inboxes instead of spam folders or being rejected.
Email deliverability measures whether the emails you send actually land in the inbox. A message can be "delivered" in the technical sense and still end up in spam, where nobody sees it. Good deliverability means your invoices, password resets and replies to customers arrive where people expect them.
For example, a contact form on your website might send notifications through your web server. If your domain has no authentication records, Gmail may treat those messages as suspicious and file them as spam, even though nothing is wrong with the content.
How email deliverability works
When your email reaches a receiving server, it runs a series of checks before deciding where to put it:
- SPF lists the servers allowed to send mail for your domain.
- DKIM adds a digital signature that proves the message wasn't changed in transit.
- DMARC tells receivers what to do if SPF or DKIM fail, and sends you reports.
- Reputation of your sending IP address and domain, built up over time.
- Content and engagement, such as spammy wording, broken links, and whether people open or delete your messages.
All three authentication records live in your DNS as TXT records, alongside the MX records that handle incoming mail.
Why email deliverability matters
If your emails go to spam, customers miss order confirmations, leads go cold and people assume you never replied. Google and Yahoo now require bulk senders to authenticate their mail, and unauthenticated messages are increasingly filtered even from small senders. Deliverability problems are also hard to spot, because nothing bounces back to tell you.
Common email deliverability problems
- Missing or wrong SPF records, often because a newsletter or CRM service was never added.
- Two SPF records on one domain, which makes both invalid.
- Sending marketing emails from the same address as your important transactional mail.
- A shared hosting IP address with a poor reputation, which is one form of the bad neighbour effect.
- Buying email lists, which leads to spam complaints and blocklisting.
- A compromised website sending spam through your account.
How to improve email deliverability
- Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC for every domain you send from.
- Use a dedicated email service for newsletters and bulk sends.
- Only email people who asked to hear from you, and make unsubscribing easy.
- Test with a mail checker that scores your authentication and content.
- Check whether your domain or IP appears on public blocklists.
AblePage configures SPF, DKIM and DMARC for your domain during setup, and every plan includes unlimited email accounts with 10 GB each.