Why I write this newsletter about deliverability

For a long time I worked deliverability inside ESPs and client teams. Hours, days, whole weeks spent in the same kind of problem. After enough of it, I started seeing the same thing everywhere, no matter the company. The email team didn't really understand deliverability. Not because they were bad at their jobs. They were good people who were busy with other work, and this one part had fallen on them without anyone teaching it.

So when I had spare time, I started reading the Upwork job board and scrolling LinkedIn to see what people were actually asking for. I did this for months before I took a single client.

Some requests were simple. Help me set up my DNS. Which platform should I use for my business. Fair questions, and I could answer them in an afternoon. But under those, the same confusion kept coming up, from people running real email programs at real companies. They couldn't read their own numbers. Open rates moved and they didn't know why. Clicks didn't line up with sends. They were checking a dashboard every week and hoping it meant what they thought it meant.

These weren't beginners. Some of them ran email for businesses doing serious revenue. They had just never been shown this part, because nobody's job was to show them.

What finally got me in the water was the DMARC mandate. When Gmail and Yahoo announced that bulk senders had to authenticate properly or get filtered, a lot of teams went from confused to worried overnight. The thing they'd been ignoring suddenly had a deadline. That's when I started taking clients. Big teams, small teams, solo operators. The first job was almost always the same. Fix the DNS. Get SPF, DKIM and DMARC right before the cutoff.

But the DNS was never the real problem. It was just the part you could see.

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Here's what I worked out doing this over and over. Deliverability belongs to nobody. The marketing or CRM team assumes it's technical, so it must be IT's job. IT looks at it and can't help, because it isn't really a technical problem. You can't fix sender reputation by editing a config file. It takes time on the job, an understanding of how the providers actually behave, and experience the org chart doesn't account for. So it falls into the gap between the two teams and sits there until something breaks.

That's the truth I started telling. Not that anyone is bad at their job. The opposite. The people I work with are sharp and busy and care about doing it right. They were handed something nobody trained them for, then left alone with it.

And this matters more every year, because the ground under it keeps moving and nobody's been put in charge of keeping up.

Look at the last few years. Apple Mail Privacy Protection landed and broke open rates as a reliable number overnight. If you'd built your sense of "is this working" on opens, the floor moved and nobody sent a memo. Then Gmail and Yahoo brought in the authentication rules, and a lot of senders found out the hard way that email they'd sent for years was suddenly bouncing. Gmail kept going and started rejecting non-compliant mail at the server level instead of dropping it in spam, so you don't even get the spam folder as a warning anymore. There are more changes moving through the technical layer right now that most senders won't hear about until their numbers slip.

Every one of those shifts asked the same question. Who at your company is responsible for knowing this happened and reacting to it?

So let me ask you directly. At your company, who owns deliverability? Picture the actual person. If a name came to mind quickly, you're in better shape than most. If it didn't, or if the honest answer is that it lands on you somewhere between everything else you do, that's the gap I'm talking about, and you're in it.

It's almost never anyone. Marketing didn't catch those changes because they looked technical. IT didn't catch them because they don't work in this. And the person in the middle, the one actually sending the email, was busy doing the job they were hired for.

This is the part the industry doesn't say plainly, because there's money in the confusion. There's a whole market built on tools that hand you a green score and let you feel like the work is done. A dashboard that says you're fine is easier to sell than the truth, which is that deliverability takes real understanding and keeps changing whether you're watching or not.

I got tired of seeing good people pay for that and still end up in trouble.

So I started writing this. Not to sell you a tool, and not to make deliverability sound harder than it is so you'll hire me. The opposite. I write Send Point for the person sitting in that gap. The one staring at opens and clicks they were never taught to read, the one whose company assumes someone else has this handled, the one who got the DMARC email and felt their stomach drop.

I want you to understand this part of your work. What the numbers mean. What the providers are watching. What changed last month and whether it affects you. Not enough to become a specialist, but enough to stop guessing, and enough to know when something is genuinely wrong versus when a dashboard is just trying to worry you into a subscription.

That's the reason this exists. The people doing this work deserve to understand it, and almost nobody is giving them the plain version.

So that's what I'm here to do. Every issue, one real problem, explained the way I'd explain it if you replied to this email and asked. Which you can. I read every one.

And if you recognised yourself in this, the person holding deliverability with no training and no time, and something is going wrong right now, that's the work I do. Audits and recovery for teams who need someone who knows this part. Reply to this email, or find me at LinkedIn, and we'll work out what's happening with your sending.

— Pavel

Before You Go: Here's How I Can Help

— Pavel