Why Email Deliverability Tools Fail Businesses

Email deliverability is a broad category of tools designed to help your organization get your email messages to your intended recipients. Subcategories of tools include:

  • TLS Reporting
  • MTA-STS Reporting
  • Blacklist monitoring
  • DMARC Compliance Management and Reporting
  • Inbox Placement Analysis
  • Email Warming
  • Google Postmaster and other Feedback Loops

Clearly, there is a lot to unpack here, and that’s the start of why many tools fail their business customers: too much complexity.

Complexity

The landscape of email deliverability solutions is very complex. Most vendors focus on a narrow area of email delivery. Take a few different examples:

  • DMARC Management and Reporting is a maturing specialty market with a large number of providers often offering only DMARC and nothing more.
  • Blacklist solutions market has been around almost 20 years with only a few specialty tools with blacklisting becoming less of a hindrance due to the use of mass cloud-based emailers.
  • Email Warming is a highly niche market with few entrants as cloud-based email solutions reduce the need for much of it.

This level of complexity can mean a business either needs to adopt multiple solutions or miss out on some of the functionality they need to manage email deliverability. A full email deliverability suite will allow management and reporting of the most important layers of email deliverability:

  • Blacklist Monitoring and Management
  • DMARC Compliance Management and Reporting
  • Inbox Placement Analysis
  • Google Postmaster and other Feedback Loops

Organizational Ownership

There are a few major business cases driving adoption of email deliverability technologies:

  • Protecting the brand from being used in fraud and phishing, usually driven by IT Security
  • Improving email delivery rates to increase downstream email metrics including sales.
  • Meeting Google, Yahoo and Microsoft bulk sender requirements to keep access to their inboxes.

Typically, Marketing drives the last two use cases. While IT and Marketing both have reasons to improve email deliverability, coordination is required for both of them to achieve value. Marketing owns the sales outcomes and will drive much of the adoption of email deliverability tools, but IT will end up implementing many of the underlying technologies, including SPF, DKIM and DMARC DNS entries. Lacking tools for both Marketing and IT to achieve their goals is another way email deliverability tools fail businesses.

What “delivery” actually means

Unfortunately, there are multiple very specific definitions around email delivery, and they differ from the popular idea of what it means for an email to be delivered.

  • Delivery – Technically, an email is considered delivered when the receiving server accepts the email from the sending server. This means a complete SMTP negotiation of the email payload via accepted TLS encryption. Most email is rejected at the server if not properly encrypted.
  • Quarantine Delivery – Many systems will accept an email, run email filtering algorithms and place the email in a quarantine box that only IT email administrators can access.
  • Spam/Junk Folder Delivery – Specialized algorithms at inbox providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft sift through incoming email for compliance with content and reputation rules, including algorithms that compare content to known spam content.
  • Inbox Delivery – This is the holy grail for email delivery and what most people assume “delivery” means. In fact, Inbox Delivery only occurs if the email passes many tests.

Since final inbox delivery is not guaranteed, email deliverability tools need to measure Inbox Placement in addition other email delivery metrics.

Email Deliverability is a Moving Target

Email is an ever-changing landscape attempting to balance accepting important correspondence while blocking unwanted or harmful email. Since the first days of email, spam has been a threat to inboxes. Back then, spammers setup their own email servers and broadcast from static IP addresses giving rise to IP-based blacklists. Then, specific domains were known to send spam, so domain-based blacklists were created. Now, spammers can setup and teardown email servers programmatically making spoofing easy while avoiding blacklists. DMARC forces those spammers to step through a few additional compliance hoops and ensures that they can’t use imitate legitimate domains. Now we have proprietary content algorithms for inbox placement. In the future, there will be additional AI-driven acceptance criteria to combat AI-based spam, spoofing and other malicious email. The arms-race is constantly evolving so email deliverability tools must as well. Businesses lose out if they are not subscribing to email deliverability tools that are also constantly evolving.

How MxToolbox Helps

MxToolbox has over 20 years of experience in Email Deliverability technologies. Starting from basic DNS lookups to help IT admins setup email servers, we have constantly improved our free tools and paid email delivery solutions to meet the constant changes in the market. At MxToolbox.com, you can get free TLS Report, MTA-STS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and Blacklist lookups.

Our paid suite, MxToolbox Delivery Center provides everything you need to manage your email delivery through its constantly changing requirements. We provide:

  • Adaptive Blacklist Monitoring
  • DMARC Reporting and Management
  • Inbox Placement Analysis
  • Feedback Loop integration including major vendors and Google Postmaster reporting.

In addition, we have a team of experts that can provide a Managed Services approach to email delivery. We can take over or simply assist you with improve your email deliverability, managing your adoption of DMARC and other email deliverabilty issues.