Email deliverability is whether your emails land in the inbox rather than the spam folder. It depends on domain setup, bounce and spam complaint rates and sending volume much more than on wording, so it is mostly a technical and list quality problem.
Cold email and lead gentopic
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In one line
Whether your emails land in the inbox rather than spam. It depends on domain setup, bounce and complaint rates and sending volume more than wording.
Inbox providers judge each sender on reputation. They look at authentication records (SPF, DKIM and DMARC), how many messages bounce, how many people mark mail as spam, how many reply or engage, and how suddenly volume changes. A new domain sending hundreds of cold emails on day one looks like spam.
Google's sender guidelines ask all senders to set up SPF or DKIM and keep the spam rate reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3 percent. Senders of more than 5,000 messages a day to Gmail accounts must also use DMARC and offer one click unsubscribe on marketing and subscribed messages. Yahoo has published similar rules. Rules change, so check the providers' current pages.
Good deliverability comes from authenticated domains, verified lists, modest daily volume per mailbox, warmed up sending domains and messages people actually want to reply to.
Why it matters to recruiters
If outreach lands in spam, nothing else matters: not the subject line, the personalization or the role. Poor deliverability can also affect everyday emails from the same domain, such as interview confirmations and offers. Recruiters who send volume outreach need to treat deliverability as part of the job.
An example from a recruiting desk
An agency's reply rates suddenly drop. A check shows DMARC is missing on its outreach domain and one mailbox sent 300 emails in a day to an unverified list. The team adds DMARC, verifies its lists, caps each mailbox at a modest daily volume and spreads sending across several inboxes. Over the next weeks replies recover.
Tips that help
Set up SPF, DKIM and DMARC on every domain you send from.
Verify lists and remove bounces before each campaign.
Keep daily volume per mailbox modest and increase it slowly.
Send cold outreach from a separate domain to protect your main one.
Mistakes to avoid
Blaming subject lines when the real problem is domain setup or list quality.
Sending a big campaign from a brand new domain with no warmup.
Which tools help?
A few of the deliverability tools in our directory. Prices are the published starting price on the date we last checked.
Send test messages to accounts you control at major providers, review authentication with a checker, watch reply and bounce rates, and use Google Postmaster Tools for Gmail spam data.
Do spam words hurt deliverability?
They matter far less than reputation, authentication and list quality. Avoid pushy, hype filled language anyway, since it lowers replies and can raise complaints from the people who read it.
What is a good spam complaint rate?
Google asks senders to stay below 0.3 percent in Postmaster Tools and recommends aiming below 0.1 percent. Lower is always better.
