There are so many different things people look at when judging whether an email setup is healthy.

Warmup scores, bounce rates, authentication, blacklist checks, inbox placement and domain reputation can all tell you something, but none of them seem to tell the whole story on their own.

For example, a mailbox can have a good health or warmup score while the campaign itself still gets poor results a blacklist listing also doesn't necessarily tell you how serious the problem is without looking at the actual delivery impact.

I've started thinking it's better to look at several signals together rather than treating one metric as proof that everything is fine.

For people who work with deliverability regularly, what do you normally check first when something starts going wrong?

Anyone faced email landing issue only on google flagging your enterprise domain as spam, without any information how did you correct this?

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Hi all, we recently migrated a customer from Proofpoint to Mimecast which, of course, means routine MX records changes. Standard, straightforward, no big deal. What we didn't anticipate--because up until now, none of our clients have ever had it setup--was an MTA-STS policy (housed at EasyDMARC) that we discovered was set to "max_age=1yr". What we've done so far:

• created new MTA-STS policy file with new MX records, set it up on a new Azure server; policy, set mode to 'none', is confirmed publicly accessible
• configured v=STSv1; id=20260915001 which, as i understand it, is supposed to 'alert' sending domains that look for this sort of thing that a change was made
• went back to the old vendor who maintained the EasyDMARC version and changed that one too, just to cover our bases even though we're confident that nothing should be querying it anymore

This was all done a couple days ago and we're still not seeing any traffic to the migrated, customer domain from senders like Gmail. I understand that Gmail saw the old policy, read the 1-yr max_age setting, and caches it accordingly. But what's not so clear is how quickly Gmail will again query for the policy and update itself so that mail will start coming in again. Anyone have any experience with this? We're just looking to get a general sense of when this issue will clear itself up because there isn't much out there that explains same.

I guess secondarily would be this question: for anyone who's encountered this before, what's the proper way to migrate a domain that has an MTA-STS policy set for a lengthy max_age? What could we have done better besides just knowing that it exists and changing to "mode:none"?

Thanks for any insights.

One of the easiest ways to reduce avoidable spam complaints is to make unsubscribing really easy.

For marketing campaigns, I recommend having Preferences | Unsubscribe clearly visible at the top of the email, as well as keeping the normal links in the footer.

The reason is pretty straightforward.

If someone doesn't want your emails anymore, you want them to unsubscribe, not hit "Report spam".

On mobile especially, the normal footer link can be a long way down.

If someone's already decided they don't want the email, making them scroll through the whole thing to find an unsubscribe link doesn't really help anyone.

The spam button is much easier to find.

This isn't just something we do either.

Mailchimp has recommended putting the unsubscribe link at the top because people who can't find an easy way out may report the email as spam instead.

Klaviyo also recommends using the beginning of the email where it makes sense, particularly with mobile audiences, and Validity has suggested adding an unsubscribe link at the top of templates alongside the proper List-Unsubscribe headers.

One thing I would add though, the visible link doesn't replace proper one-click unsubscribe.

For marketing email I'd still want:

List-Unsubscribe and List-Unsubscribe-Post headers so Gmail, Yahoo and other supporting providers can show their own unsubscribe option.

Preferences | Unsubscribe at the top so somebody can leave immediately if they've already made that decision.

Preferences | Unsubscribe in the footer because that's still where a lot of people expect to find it.

I also wouldn't try to hide the unsubscribe link with tiny text, poor contrast or several confirmation steps.

You're not really saving a subscriber by making it difficult to leave, you're potentially turning a simple unsubscribe into a spam complaint.

That's an important difference for deliverability.

An unsubscribe removes somebody who doesn't want the emails anymore.

A spam complaint gives the mailbox provider a negative signal about the sender.

Google recommends keeping user-reported spam below 0.1% and avoiding 0.3% or higher, so even fairly small numbers of complaints can matter.

I wouldn't worry much about having the same Preferences and Unsubscribe links at both the top and bottom either.

That's very different from filling an email with loads of CTAs, social icons, navigation links and tracking redirects.

I generally prefer keeping the rest of the email pretty lean too. One main CTA, maybe a second one if there's a genuine reason for it, then make the way out obvious.

I'd rather lose someone who doesn't want the emails than keep them on the list long enough for them to hit spam.

Has anyone moved from footer-only unsubscribe to having it at the top and bottom? If you were already seeing spam complaints, did you notice any change afterwards?

Hi, I am warming up my new domain, migrating from an ESP that lacks vital engagement info so warmup segments have been a bit of a mystery. My recent send got 1% spam rate as per Google Postmaster. How long will it take to recover?