Deliverability best practices

Good deliverability comes from sending mail people want, from a domain receivers trust, at a steady volume. These habits cover most of it.

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Consent

• Only email people who asked for it. A signup form, a checkout checkbox or an account registration counts. A purchased, rented or scraped list doesn’t, and mailing one is the fastest way to have your sending put on hold.
• Use double opt-in on public forms. It stops typos and bots, and gives you evidence of consent. See Create a form.
• Say what they’ll get, and send that. People who get something different from what they signed up for mark it as spam.

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List hygiene

• Let the suppression list do its job. Never remove hard-bounce or complaint suppressions to re-mail people. See Bounces, complaints and suppression.
• Stop mailing people who never engage. Build a segment of contacts with no activity for a few months and leave them out of regular sends, or send them one “do you still want these?” email first.
• Import with care. Remove old addresses before importing a list that hasn’t been mailed in a long time. They’re the ones most likely to hard-bounce.

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Content

• Make the sender recognizable. Use a from name and address people know.
• Keep the unsubscribe link easy to find. People who can’t find it press Report spam.
• Write a plain-text version. Some people and systems read it, and a message with no text part looks less trustworthy.
• Be careful with link shorteners and images. Shortened links hide your domain, and an email that’s one large image with no text is a classic spam pattern.
• Test first. Preview the email and send it to yourself on more than one mail app before the campaign goes out. See Create a campaign.

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Volume and cadence

• Grow gradually. New organizations have daily limits that rise over 30 days. Even after that, big jumps in volume look suspicious and can trigger a sending review.
• Send your best first. When you start, or return after a break, send to your most engaged contacts first and widen the audience over several sends.
• Keep a steady rhythm. A regular schedule is easier for receivers to trust than long silences followed by bursts.

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Domains and subdomains

• Send from your own domain. The Brudcast trial address is for getting started. The reputation you build on your own verified domain stays yours.
• Consider subdomains for different kinds of mail. For example mail.example.com for marketing and notify.example.com for receipts. Reputation is checked per sending domain, so a marketing problem is less likely to affect your receipts.
• Remember the organization is judged too. Brudcast adds up every domain you own when it checks reputation, so a new domain won’t hide a problem. See Reputation and suspension.

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Dedicated IPs

A dedicated IP is a sending address used only by your organization, so your reputation depends on your own mail alone. It’s a paid feature, requested per sending domain from the domain’s IP Pools tab. Brudcast raises a new IP’s volume gradually over 30 days, and slows the warmup down automatically if its bounce or complaint rate rises. Dedicated IPs suit steady, high volume: an IP with low or irregular volume can deliver worse than the shared pool, because receivers never see enough mail from it to trust it.

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After every large send

Look at Reports > Deliverability within a day:

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