Welcome to 52 weeks of email best practices — delivered straight to your inbox. Each Tuesday you'll get one focused lesson you can apply at work the same day. No fluff. Just the knowledge that separates teams that land in the inbox from teams that wonder why nobody responded.
This Week’s Lesson
Here's a sobering fact: roughly 1 in 6 legitimate business emails never reaches the inbox. They land in spam, get silently filtered, or are rejected outright — and the sender usually has no idea.
Why does this happen? Email providers like Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo don't just deliver every message they receive. They evaluate each email against dozens of signals: authentication records, sender reputation, content quality, engagement history, and more.
Think of it like a credit score for your email — except instead of getting a loan, you're trying to get your message read. A domain with no authentication records, no sending history, and no engagement looks suspicious to a mail server, even if you've never sent a single piece of spam in your life.
Over the next 52 weeks, we'll break down every major signal that affects email deliverability — and show you what good looks like at each layer.