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Winning the inbox: practical deliverability

The deliverability work that decides whether any of your lifecycle effort reaches a human. List hygiene, bounces, complaints, MPP, Gmail quirks.

7

guides

60 min

reading

What you'll get

Hands-on deliverability for operators with enough scale to actually see the problems. Covers list hygiene without nuking your audience, what drives bounces vs complaints, why Apple Mail Privacy broke measurement, the 102KB Gmail clip, and what the Promotions tab means for your campaigns. Roughly 80 minutes end-to-end.

Reading path

  1. Email deliverability — the practitioner's guide

    Deliverability isn't a setting. It's the running total of every send decision you've made since you bought the domain. Four pillars hold it up. Break one and the whole program starts leaking.

    12 min read

  2. List hygiene: the six-rule policy

    List hygiene isn't cleanup; it's a continuous policy that runs automatically. Here's the six-rule policy every lifecycle program should have written down, each tied to a specific deliverability outcome.

    8 min read

  3. Bounce rate management: the thresholds and the fix order

    Bounce rate is the easiest deliverability metric to read and the easiest to misread. Here's what each bounce type actually means, the thresholds that trigger real problems, and the fix order when your rate climbs.

    8 min read

  4. Spam complaints: the playbook for detecting and reducing them

    Spam complaints are the hardest-hitting negative reputation signal in email. They compound faster than bounces and recover slower. This is the playbook — what actually triggers them, how to catch them early, and the four levers that reliably bring the rate back down.

    9 min read

  5. Apple Mail Privacy Protection, four years in

    Apple broke the open rate in 2021. Half the lifecycle industry is still pretending it didn't happen. Four years on, the programs that actually adapted are beating the ones that kept optimising a metric that doesn't exist anymore.

    8 min read

  6. Why Gmail clips emails at 102KB (and how to stop it)

    Gmail has been clipping emails over 102KB since 2013. The 'View entire message' link almost nobody clicks is where your unsubscribe, secondary CTA, and legal footer go to die. Here's how bytes actually pile up and the discipline that keeps every send under the threshold.

    8 min read

  7. Gmail Promotions tab: is landing there actually bad?

    The Promotions tab has been a marketing bogeyman since 2013. The honest answer: it's usually fine, sometimes a problem, and the fix is almost never 'try to escape the tab'. Here's how to think about it.

    7 min read

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Check your understanding

Five multiple-choice questions on the ideas from the reading path above. Nothing is saved — this is a personal check, not a test.

Question 1 of 5

0 correct so far

Your bounce rate jumps from 0.8% to 4% overnight. What's the likeliest cause?

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