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Email deliverability

Also known as: inbox placement, getting email delivered, landing in spam

Email deliverability is whether your business email actually reaches the inbox instead of the spam folder — and the main thing in your control is proving to mail providers that your email is genuinely from you.

What it is

Email deliverability is the question of where your email ends up: the inbox, the spam folder, or rejected entirely. It’s decided by the receiving provider (Gmail, Outlook, and so on) based on how trustworthy your email looks. A big part of that trust comes from whether your domain proves its email is authentic.

Crucially, when email goes to spam you usually get no error and no bounce. It just silently doesn’t get read.

Why it matters to your business

If your quotes, invoices, and replies land in spam, deals go cold and you never learn why. You’re not getting a “delivery failed” notice — the customer simply never sees the message and assumes you didn’t reply. That’s revenue leaking out invisibly.

Gmail and Yahoo have tightened their rules: they now expect business senders to authenticate their email, and they junk or reject what they can’t verify. So the same settings that protect you from impersonation also decide whether your genuine mail gets seen at all. Poor authentication is now a direct sales problem, not just a security one.

How to tell / what to do

The foundations of good deliverability are the email-authentication settings: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Our free checker shows whether yours are correct. Getting them right is free and is the single highest-impact thing you can do to keep your mail out of spam. Start with the SPF fix guide.

Want to fix this on your own domain? See the free guide →