Email Deliverability Masterclass for Newsletters - SPF, DKIM, DMARC & Warm-Up with Anthony from Mission Inbox | Episode 4 | The LetterStack Podcast

Speaker A: Welcome to episode four of the letterstack podcast. Now, if you're scaling a newsletter business, you know that at some point in time, you're going to work with email outreach and cold emailing. And when you do cold emailing, there's one thing we need to keep top of mind. Email deliverability. In simple terms, it means you want to make sure your emails hit the primary inbox of your consumer. Now, newsletter businesses are no different. And Tony or Anthony Boltadano from Mission Inbox knows this really well. He spent a decade in sales. He has done cold emailing for all this time, so much so that he actually built an entire email infrastructure platform around it called Mission Inbox. So he understands that everybody would like to see their emails hit their recipient's inbox, and so would every newsletter subscriber. Now, we have seen platform outages in the past, and, and I know every email service provider provides a certain level of deliverability assurances, but let's make sure we understand what goes behind the scenes to make sure emails are guaranteed to hit a primary inbox and not land in spam. Right? So what we have here is Tony taking us through what it takes to ensure that reliability and how you could do it for your own user data. So thank you, Tony, for making time for us. Welcome to the podcast.

Speaker B: Thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Awesome. And Tony, I know we are going to talk about emails and nerd out on all technical metrics on how email deliverability works behind the scenes, but before we get into emails, would you mind telling the audience about what you had done prior to Mission Inbox? What was your background? Could you explain a little more in detail?

Speaker B: Sounds good. So, well, just like you said, I've, uh, been, uh, almost about a decade into email deliverability or just sales positions in general. That's how I started my career as an sdr. Always being involved in high volume, high scalability, cold emailing with good deliverability to ensure that again, every single thing that I was to send out, if I was not getting a response, it was 100% my fault, not an infrastructure problem, which is what a lot of people have nowadays. Um, I ended up building a lead generation consulting business and also a deliverability consulting business, which we ended up selling to one of our biggest customers, uh, back in the day, on the agency days. And my co founder and I decided, you know, understanding that deliverability is gonna be a tougher and tougher situation to handle moving forward. And we've seen that since October 2023 when everybody started, you know, freaking out With Google accounts getting suspended. Um, then on July of last year as well, we had new updates from Yahoo, from Google and Microsoft, both for business to business and also to personal recipients, which is what almost everyone on the newsletter world will send to, um, at least a big portion of it. So we built Machine Inbox for the purpose of deliverability, being able to make sure that all the components that are very relevant for deliverability are managed by you and that you have full visibility and control over things that are happening versus other tools that, you know, it's kind of like a plug and play sort of situation, but it doesn't tell you what's going on in the backend. In our case, we value transparency and of course, deliverability. So we give you an OBS solution to handle both your cold emailing and also your transactional and marketing email, becoming essentially like a SendGrid or recent or Melgan competitor where we actually allow, ah, you to send, you know, these cells or cold or marketing emails without getting suspended, which is one of the main issues that, you know, people usually have when using Beehive or SendGrid itself. You have to go through compliance, showing all these different data points, which again we were also gonna check out. Um, but overall infrastructure is just way better. And again we take a few things on the back end, which I'm not gonna go into it, um, that will ensure, you know, deliverability is on par with anything that you can see on the market right now.

Speaker A: Right. And one thing that our, uh, audience also needs to know, and I'm sure, Tony, you would probably attest to that, is there are so many email platform providers doing newstudder capabilities, I would say, but behind the scenes, almost all of them use SendGrid as the infrastructure to send out emails. So eventually it all boils down to SendGrid's reliability and resilience as a platform. Now we know it's a robust platform, it's been around for a while, but I want to make sure that people, when they're placing all their bets in a newsletter business or an email business, they understand at least what's going on behind the scenes. And to be able to peel the layers behind what happens when an email goes out from your inbox and it's on its way to a, uh, recipient's inbox right now. If you wouldn't mind talking about the process a little bit behind the scenes. But if you could explain it like we are, fine, right? And explain it in simple terms. So let's say we are trying to send out from A G Suite workspace inbox, let's say it's I.com for example, and I'm sending it to tonye.com who is in a Microsoft Outlook infrastructure. So what goes on behind the scenes? What's the things that, uh, prevents an inbox or prevents an email from hitting the primary inbox? And how so?

Speaker B: 100%. So I think it's very important to differentiate first and foremost when we're thinking about cold emails and then marketing and transactional emails. And the reason why I bring this up is because whenever you're sending from a mailbox, right? So you know, you log into your G Suite account or to your Microsoft 365, um, you're essentially sending from a mailbox to another mailbox. That would be normally considered a cold email. Now on the newsletter game, you have, uh, let's say you're using sendgrid or using Mailground or any of, uh, these API sends. You're not creating a mailbox to send those emails out. Instead of that, you're sending through an API that connects to your domain and it sends on your behalf, right? So it's about changing the SPF record so that if you're sending from SendGrid, that SendGrid record is included within the SPF, otherwise it's not gonna be authorized. But you can still send the emails out. And that's why they ask you to add a few DNS.

Speaker A: Tony, if you wouldn't mind my interrupting, could you talk about what SPF and other technical terms are, uh, in simple terms for the audience to understand?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So when it comes down to authentication protocols, this is what these are called. Um, we have, you know, let's say top three, you have spf, dkim and dmarc. And the easiest way that I have of explaining it, spf. Hm. I'll do an analogy on letters, right? Like back in the day, letters. So SPF would be like your carrier, right? So I myself, Tony, will give a letter to the carrier, let's call it ups, for just to give an example. And I authorize UPS to send emails on my behalf. But it's me, right? At the end of the day, it's me. So think of me as a domain. This domain authorizes SendGrid to send on my behalf using my domain. That is an SPF. Now, on the DKIM side of things, we have the domain key. Um, this domain key basically is the seal within the letter that ensures that all the content within that letter hasn't been tampered with. So for example, if I was a bad actor, I could grab your domain or anyone's domain in an SMTP server sent from your domain, even if it's not authenticated. So dkim is that seal where it ensures that whatever content you're seeing is actually as I intended to send it out, instead of somebody opening that seal and breaking that wax seal. And, um, if you open up a wax seal or a letter and it has a bad wax seal, you know that the content within it. Exactly. And then you have the dmarc. And the DMARC is kind of like the watch, like the somebody that ensures that both home sending and my DKIM M being correct. And if for whatever reason, uh, the watch sees that, you know, either the SPF, meaning, you know, Tony authorized UPS, but he didn't authorize FedEx. So if FedEx is the one sending, uh, this letter to my recipient, DMARC itself will pause it and will stop it. Dmarc, uh, has three different settings. One of them is called P None. So P policy. It basically means policy none means if I see something weird happening with either my SPF or my dkim, do nothing, which is not necessarily good for deliverability, but at least you have a record, so that is necessary for deliverability. On the other hand, you have reject and quarantine, reject being the most strict one, Quarantine being like a good middle ground for people starting out quarantine. What it tells you is if the Watch sees that either my SPF or the Kim M end up failing, I will send I myself. I'm telling the watch to grab that letter and put it into the spam folder. So that email is still being delivered, but it's sent automatically into the spam folder. And the reason that you would want an email from coding to the spam folder is if I were to spoof your email address. And by spoofing I mean impersonating you with no authorization. I want to make sure that whatever you're sending actually doesn't get into my recipient's inbox. Because what if I want to scam them? Or if I have like a hyperlink that is going to be bad for security. Those sort of things can happen. And then reject, on the other hand, um, basically tells I want you to grab that letter and destroy it, meaning it never gets to the recipient's inbox. Um, this is not necessarily the setting that I would recommend for a lot of people just because it requires you to be very, very on top of every single one of your servers. So if you're sending from G Suite and also from SendGrid and also from a different place. You need to make sure that every single DNS record has that information and that you can test it so that you don't get a lot of DMARC notifications that everything is being rejected because of a human error on your side that makes all these things happen. So that is what I mean by spf, dkim and dmarc. SPF being the authorized sender or carrier, dkim being the letter or the wax seal within the letter that ensures nothing is tampered with, and the DMARC being the one that is like your watcher checking every single email or letter that you send out being within the authorized SPF and with a DKIM already set up.

Speaker A: Awesome. That's a really good analogy to actually set things in motion. Tony, thank you so much for that. If I might continue on to the same analogy to keep explaining, uh, the process of actually reaching the primary inbox. Now, let's say everything works well and there's nothing in the settings that you talked about, the three settings, spf, dkim and dmarc. And let's say the email has a chance to reach the inbox of the consumer. Now, are there still other scenarios where they actually land in, let's say, promotions or they probably get prevented from hitting the primary inbox. Does copy play a role by any chance? Or layer or content? Would you mind talking about that?

Speaker B: Yep. So when we're thinking about the authentication protocols, think of them as a baseline of things that you should have. Doesn't matter what you're sending. So that is always going to be the baseline. Now the other components on deliverability have to do with the copywriting, how clean your lit list is. Right. So if people are unsubscribing, of course, make sure that you do not contact them again and that you have a process of cleaning that database. Because every now and then, uh, at least with personal recipients, mailboxes can be full out of storage. Right. So all those things, ensuring that everything is clean is going to be, you know, 10 out of 10 for your reputation. Now, thinking about the content specifically, there's, um, definitely a lot of the famous spam words. Right. So if I were to send a marketing email and I have a lot of, um, let's say free, you know, get one, buy one for free, uh, promotions, like everything that looks very markety, that has all these words that could be identified as marketing emails, are not necessarily the best for deliverability. Right. So you want to make sure that whatever content you're sending out is as if I was talking to a friend. Still being professional, of course and, but not over the top with, you know, this is an excellent opportunity. Invest now this, the other, because those are words that are gonna get picked up because that's what usually scammers send. Right? So if you think about in scammers terms, what do they do? Something very catchy, something to get a response or maybe just click on a link. Those are the sort of things that you want to avoid even if all the DNS records are 10 out of 10, etc. Um, so yeah, you want to avoid those spam words. And at the same time, uh, you know, we haven't talked about the other components of deliverability such as domain age, about warm up, uh, domain reputation, Google Postmaster, etc. There's a few more things that maybe we're going to end up talking down the road that also come into play when it comes down to getting an inbox into an email, into the inbox folder or promotions or uh, you know, forums, social updates, etc. Right.

Speaker A: Right now I'm not going to be a saint and tell that my emails are never going to be marketed because I'm going to be likely using news status as a market marketing channel. So let's be honest here. But there's a thin line between educating and building trust with the consumers and eventually selling an info product to them down the road or a real product to them down the road. Right now let's say, you know, the copy seems fine, it's not too salesy or markety, if you might put it that way. Uh, do links and images and all of these components in a specific HTML email play a role, uh, in reaching the primary inbox too? Would you mind talking about that?

Speaker B: Yes. So think of it as the more, the heavier the email is, the less likely it is to get into the inbox folder. And when I'm talking about heavy, think of it as if I have attachments that have to load whenever I send an email out. If I have an image that has to load, if I send an email out, if I have open and click tracking for every link that I have, it makes the email heavier ever so slightly, but it makes the email heavier. The heavier the email, the more things that the spam scoring system have to filter out on. And if they give you, ah, a plus score, plus in this case is if you're in positive, it means you're most likely going to the spam folder. The more negative or Close to zero the better. So, yes, all those things come into play now. That being said, um, Google actually introduced something back in June of last year. So about a year ago, uh, to be specific, where in the past people used to track opens, that was their measure of deliverability. And you know, many people use it still today on the newsletter game just because it's opt in. So it's a little bit of a different protocol still not necessarily the best for deliverability. So what ends up happening nowadays is that if you go to Gmail, maybe you check the latest newsletters that you've received, every now and then you're gonna get it into the inbox folder. But when you click on the email itself, first and foremost, it's gonna look a little bit clunky if there's some images. And then it's also gonna have a gray banner on top saying images in this message are hidden. Uh, you know, let's make sure that you trust the sender before blah, blah, blah. You have a button that says show images and another one called report a spam. So even if users get it into the inbox folder today, it's kind of like a gray area because even if it's in the inbox, people have a very quick way of marking you spam and then unsubscribing right away. Right. So it's a little bit of an iffy situation to be in. And that is only if you're sending images. Right. So until I click on, no, that's okay. Show images. Will the full HTML of my email actually show up? So if I'm investing a lot of time into making a very pretty, HTML heavy, uh, email, there is a high chance that a lot of these elements might not even pop up because people have to authorize it before really seeing the email itself. That's why I'm more of an advocate of as more plain text as possible, the better you can use the marketing material. At the end of the day, you might think about it in these following terms. To make it easier. Would you rather have a very, let's say plain text email that looks decent? Not necessarily the prettiest, but it looks decent, has very impactful content, so something valuable and gets into the inbox folder or something that is, you know, you invested a lot of time into the design of it, but because of the fact that you invested so much time on the Internet side, it makes the email heavier and therefore it goes into the spam folder. Right. So at some point you have to balance which one would you rather in my experience, it's always getting into the inbox and getting some results from whatever I'm sending.

Speaker A: Great. Now that actually touches upon a uh, very picky, uh, sensitive topic I would say. You can't track opens because one, there might be email providers like Apple who open it in a sandbox already before the email gets delivered to the recipient's inbox. There are uh, the jury is out on whether you trust open rates or not in the first place because of all of these tactics being put at the provider level itself. But if you cannot track opens or if you cannot track sends reliably, what do you think should consumers actually track so that they know that, okay, this actually went to Tony and I know that Tony received it and I don't know if he opened it or not, but I at least hope that he received it and he has been able to interact with the content. Now one way I can understand is to uh, look through click rates on the links that you might have embedded in the email. That's probably one option. Do you foresee other options which people can use to understand? Okay, how did people interact with the email and whether it was successful or not?

Speaker B: For sure. So I think there's actually a few ways that you can tackle that. Um, just like you said, both Apple and Yahoo nowadays are basically opening a lot of emails and loading all the content before they actually show it into your recipient's inbox. So you're gonna get a lot of uh, false positives, um, and even false negatives in some cases. Because I can open an email out but before I click on, or if I don't click on show images. Even though I saw the email that track in Pixel, which is a one by one uh, image that is inserted into your email will not load and therefore it will not track it back. Right. So just like you're saying do remove the open tracking, click. Uh, tracking in my experience has been okay, it has worked out a lot uh, for multiple users. There uh, are some users on top of it that are tracking uh, opens locally. So you can track an open uh, locally with unique uh, custom tracking on GA4. It's a bit of a complicated setup. You need to use GitHub and all these different things but I've seen that work out for a lot of people, um, at least in the past few years now. What would be my indication though? Uh, because at the end of day what we care about is deliverability, right? So if I cannot track opens and opens are the usual indicator of my emails going into the Inbox folder or into any other inbox. Right. So promotions, it is not considered spam, but not as many people open promotions. Right, so you want to stay away from that. My, um, preferred way of doing things is by using a platform that allows you to warm up your domain first and foremost. And I'll explain what warmup is for for those of you who have no clue about, and then those warm up tools will actually tell you what the placement is for your score and for your domain. In multiple providers such as Google, you have Gmail, so those are different. So Google Workspace or Google for Business Gmail, you have Outlook Hotmail, which are the free versions of, uh, Microsoft 365. And then you have Yahoo, AWS, GMX, et cetera, which are, let's say legacy systems that people used to use in the, the past. And each one of them has a different spam scoring system. So you could be going 100% into the inbox folder for Google, 100% into the spam folder for Outlook, Gmail and all the others. Right? So that is the important difference now going into warm up just because I think it's valuable. Warm up is essentially a process where you send emails to other recipients that are also looking to increase their reputation by creating, let's say a fake engagement, because at the end of the day it's what it is, right? So you send emails out to these recipients, they mark them as important, they, they respond back to them, they put them as a star, et cetera. All those activity metrics are helpful and are positive for Google or Outlook to take a look into your email and to your domain and see, okay, this person that sends these emails usually has a positive engagement, therefore it must be a trusted sender. That is essentially what it means. Normally you cannot build that by yourself and you're at very high risk of going into the spam folder if you try to do it organically with your own newsletter. Uh, subscription subscribers should always not depend on uncertainty. You should always make sure that whatever you're doing actually gets done. Personal recommendations, I'm a very nice advocate for warmth IO, uh, at least for newsletters. And they give you all that data that I just described. They allow you to see how many emails you've sent out, uh, what ratio of recipients you're playing with in the first place. And also allows you to run placement tests that will show you, you know, based on the template that you're thinking about sending. You upload it into Warmy, you send that test email to a SIP list, meaning you know, um, let's say 50 mailboxes or 50 different recipients. And based on whether it lands in the inbox folder or in promotions or anywhere else for those inboxes, it will tell you, hey, you know what, you're 100% into, uh, the inbox for these providers. You're going into promotions for this and you're going to spam for this other one, right? So that's the way that I would say you want to track your reputation by really tracking your reputation. You don't want to track reputation by tracking opens. It's not a very nice solution at the end of the day.

Speaker A: True, true. And I think you're rolling the dice because there are so many different providers, so to speak. People usually think of it as just G Suite and Gmail and probably Yahoo and Hotmail too, to a bigger extent, especially in an enterprise context when you're sending it out to businesses. But people don't think about the wider ecosystem of people actually building their own bespoke email infrastructure too, because they don't want to pay so much for, uh, 100 inboxes, for example. And like it or not, that's probably more the norm than the exception. There are a lot of email providers who do their own email setups and domain setups to buy their log themselves for their business. And then you want to make sure you are able to reach out to all of these people as well, apart from G Suite and Outlook. So this actually makes sense. And you know, investing in warm up and inbox placement like you mentioned, might be a very prudent move. Uh, just to find out, you know, later that you probably didn't spend enough time and effort here. Now, if I wouldn't want to, you know, scare our audience members too badly, uh, how bad does it get when a domain does not invest in these steps like inbox placements? Warm up, um, setting up these infrastructure guidelines that you talk about for spf, dkim and dmarc, uh, how bad does it get and what are the gotchas that you've seen on the field too?

Speaker B: I would say that it's mostly just to put another analogy. It's like, like driving with foggy windshields, right? Like if you have all these different protections, you make sure that you're still in control, you're still driving. So there's always risks of something messing up, but it's not because of visibility, right? Which I think is what people care about, visibility. On the other hand, if you have a very foggy windshield because of whatever going on there is a higher chance of crashing and crashing way quicker. Right, because you don't see what's up like in front of you. So without using warm up or without caring about reputation the way that I just described, you're kind of like dependent on people marking you as spam, right? It's not a bad indicator per se because if people are marking you as spam, it means your content either wasn't solicited if you're thinking about a newsletter, or it is just not valuable to people. So the way that warm up, you know how it benefits because I explained what it does, but I didn't explain how it benefits. It builds a reputation and it offsets all the spam reports that you're getting. If you don't have anything offsetting your spam reports, then what Google is going to see is, you know, this domain sent 60 emails, or let's put 100, just, you know, do some quick math with percentages. I sent 100 emails and then 10 people marked me as spam. That means that to the eyes of the ESP, my domain has a 10% spam rate. Now that is without doing warm up. If I were to do warm up, uh, more emails are going to be going out from my domain. So let's say I sent another hundred emails button warmup. My total sending volume for that domain is now 200. Therefore the 10, uh, people that marked me as spam, it is no longer a 10% but rather a 5%. So first and foremost my m spam rate gets lower. And then on top of that all these people that marked me as spam, what it does is it starts lowering your domain reputation. And what warm up does is if your domain reputation is low and because of that reason you're going into the spam folder by those emails going into the spam, into the warm up mailboxes or just recipients, they will remove them from spam. Tell Google and Outlook, hey guys, no, like this email shouldn't go to spam. I actually want to receive it. And that moves you back up into the, you know, inbox folder consistently. If you don't have it, you're just basically playing a downhill game that unless your recipients themselves go into the spam folder, open your email report as not spam, put it in start, etc. You're not playing a game that you're in control of. And that is not a game that I like playing. So that is basically, um, you know, the main benefit of it.

Speaker A: True. By the way, one thing that I don't think we would have considered our audience in mind when discussing about this. All domains have an authority score. The way every system scores a domain's authority is pretty subjective. Again, the jury's out on that one trip. So we don't know if there is a definite way of scoring it. Uh, empirically I would say. Um, but just like let's say helloworld.com as a website has a domain score. Email domains also have a domain score. Right. Uh, now I don't know if ah, Is there a math behind how the score gets computed, Tony? I don't know if people should be knowing about that one too or get anxious about that.

Speaker B: But so yeah, yeah, it looks like

Speaker A: you already have thoughts on that.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah. So there is a website, uh, which is actually owned by let's say one of the most important blacklists in the world called Spam House. Um, if you go into, and I actually have the domain close by here, uh, it is Spam House. Let's see, maybe we can share. Uh, for those of you who are

Speaker A: seeing this embed overlays on top of our uh, conversations. So doing that.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, um, I'm gonna send you the domain afterwards or the link. Uh, it's basically spamhouse.org and then it's like domain reputation. So if you go into that website you can drop your domain and then it will tell you the score that it has based on the name servers, whether it's on an SMTP account, whether it's been in the blacklist based on the sending volume that it has, etc, etc. So when it comes down to domain reputation, um, I would say the most important factor is just to not overwhelm people with the number of things that are usually used to score. It is first and foremost is your domain hosted or are the name servers hosted in a domain registrar that doesn't have a blacklist of that IP super important. And the reason why I say that is because a lot of people try to save money by buying domains on Porkbun or on namecheap, for example. Um, there is a deliverability reputation associated to where you're buying your domains. Because if those people are, you know, being used to exploit and to scam and everything else, your deliverability will be affected because of it. So make sure that if you're buying on those places, you move the name servers, in my opinion, to Cloudflare. That would be the most, um, secure, the one that has the best support and it's completely free to just move a domain from one place into the Other now that is on the domain uh, purchasing. Now the other aspect that is very important is a domain age. So that means how long ago was this domain registered? And again you can just do a quick Google search and do you know, find my domain age. There's multiple websites, you can do a who is lookup, you can go into uh, domain DNS, Org or something. It will give you all the data associated to that domain. And the main logic behind it is the older the domain, usually ideally within six to one one year, you know, minimum, uh, the higher the reputation it will have. If you think always about what spammers do, they buy as many domains as possible and they try to send emails out as quickly as possible as well. So by nature every single ESP within their spam scoring system has a different score for domains registered less than 14 days ago, less than 30 days ago, 45 days, 90 days, 180 meaning six, six months and then one year plus and onwards. So it's one year, five years, 10 years and then from 10 years plus it's always a good reputation. The older the domain the more you can get away with not following best deliverability practices. Which is why a lot of people are buying age domains from expired domains.net and such. Um, but that would be my basically my explanation. Only care about where you're buying your domains and where the name servers are hosted and domain age being important and the fact that you're not in any blacklist for that matter.

Speaker A: Sure, but I think that's very valuable and often overlooked fact that you talked about. The people buy domains from the cheapest domain registrar tool, uh, might not end well uh, you know if they don't take all of these steps that we talked about prior to this. So it would definitely be good to safeguard and put in these steps in place. By the way, uh, Tony, I know maybe Mission Inboxes probably not uh the place to start with for an early newsletter creator who's starting out their newsletter business, who's trying to keep deliverability top of mind. They have plenty of things to worry about, being consistent, writing their emails and showing up at a regular frequency too. Um, but let's say they can't afford Mission Inbox or maybe they are too small enough to start at that point. Uh, what are the tools that you would probably you know recommend which are affordable for someone to just keep track of their you know, the deliverability their sends any spam uh, instances that they are running into, where are they running into with these issues? The blacklist that you talked about uh, is there a way, are there any tools which you probably recommend which are affordable for early newsletter creator groups?

Speaker B: Yeah, for sure. So first and foremost I would have to determine whether you're doing a newsletter for an E commerce uh, business or if you're sending um, just a normal subscriber. Think of it as a SaaS, maybe like an info product, maybe uh, a course. Like all these things they should have a different or there is a different recommendation on my books. If you're in E commerce, use Klaviyo. Um, Klaviyo is basically a uh, tool that allows you to do you know, abandoned cart sequences, welcome series, all these different things which are integrated with your say Shopify, Magento, etc. Store. So that would be my way of doing it. And it can also be used to nurture your uh, own subscribers. Like all these people that you know, pull out their emails uh, to get a 15% discount or coupon within the first purchase. That is an excellent way of getting an opt in by the way guys. Um, and those emails are actually being sent through Klaviyo. So if you're in E commerce, use Klaviyo and that's it. Now for all the other use cases, um, I would normally recommend something like Beehive for example. Uh, Beehive uses SendGrid as a backend and there are some advantages and disadvantages to using Beehive which I'll explain very briefly. First things first, um, Beehive doesn't allow you to send from your own domain which has some positive repercussions for people just starting out. If you have just bought a new domain or maybe it's like just a year old but haven't sent as many emails out, it probably doesn't have that big of a reputation. The way that Beehive does it is it created, creates a subdomain or a different from address under their own subdomain which is going to be mail.beHyVE.net if I'm not mistaken. And you're basically sharing your reputation. Yes, with other users. But Beehive is the one that is handling that reputation in the first place. Right? So you can leverage that or you can make use of that reputation that they have built so that your emails have a higher chance of getting into the inbox folder without having to worry about all the things that I just mentioned. So that would be a great starting point. At the same time though, I would recommend to use something like um, Mail Reach at this point. Mail Reach or Glockups which will be your placement testing solutions. Again, you don't need to warm up your domain, especially because it's going to be a mail beehive, so it's not anything related to you. What you need to do is, well, ensure m that those emails that you're sending are actually getting into the inbox. And for that you need a placement testing tool such as mailreach, which is very affordable. It starts off at, I think it's like $20 per month or something. Something. And it gives you a set of, uh, tests that you can run, uh, to see. Okay, with this copy, with this content, where am I landing if I change this? And I was going into the spam folder and I changed these words which were flagged. Am I improving my inbox placement rate? Am I getting into the inbox at a high rate? That sort of thing is basically where I would go. I wouldn't worry too much about anything else, to be honest. Um, again, especially if you're starting out, don't overcomplicate things, worry about deliverability or about all these things. Once you have like, let's say, I don't know, 10,000 subscribers that you're sending out on a weekly, bi weekly basis before that, it should be manageable, especially if you're using the solutions that I described, um, to make your life a lot easier.

Speaker A: Perfect. And one thing we have to note, you touched upon a good point. You know, Beehive being a really popular platform. I love Beehive, by the way. Um, and they have been scaling up. They ship a lot of great features very quickly as well. But they have also not been so fortunate with platform resilience. They recently suffered through an email platform outage which I talked about on the letterstack newsletter too. Um, I know that these are probably ones that are blue moon, you know, it doesn't happen too often. People are building resilient systems too. But like you mentioned, it's probably useful to worry about it at scale when you've hit 10,000 subscribers or more. But how often should people look at deliverability as they hit this number? Tony? Once a month is good enough when you're in between 0 to 10,000.

Speaker B: I'm a little bit of, um, a control freak. So I like doing it at least on a weekly basis. And it will have to depend or vary depending on what's your sending frequency. I know people that are sending a monthly newsletter. I know people sending bi weekly. I know people sending weekly newsletters. Right. So it really depends on your use case. I personally like doing like once a week, even if I'm sending like biweekly or anything like that so that I can get ahead of issues and within that time that I'm not sending, I can get to fix whatever. It's not working. Right. So in my experience, it's always like a. It literally takes like 10 to 15 minutes to run a placement test on the content that you're thinking about sending for the following week, just to make sure that whatever you're sending actually will get into Inbox, right? Otherwise you're going to be sending something that will not get into the Inbox folder and then you're going to, you know, beat yourself up, like, oh, why didn't I think about it? Right? So my experience, once a week is more than enough. Um, that would allow you to get ahead of issues instead of them hitting you in the face instead. And it's just a good practice to know your health status, your health score, everything else to ensure that you're always maximizing your placement.

Speaker A: True. And I call that a healthy amount of paranoia mixed with daily life. So I think that's probably best served for any business owner, I would say me included for that matter. But this has been a super helpful conversation. Tony, any parting words, any words of wisdom that people need to know about, which we could not cover in these questions that we did?

Speaker B: Tony, from your end, I think overall we can just sum it up into have your DNS settings authenticated properly. If you do not know how to use your DNS or what you have to edit, go to ChatGPT and ask it, hey, I'm using this service, I'm doing this. It will tell you the record that you need to add and that you can bundle it together. Uh, do warm up whenever possible, unless you're using Beehive, because you cannot warm up Beehive. Make sure that you're not overdoing the spam words, meaning, you know, the free, the all cabs, the emojis, all these things. Make sure your email is as text friendly as possible instead of HTML and pretty friendly. And finally, just make sure that, you know, you're taking it personal by, you know, testing deliverability at least once a week. Overall, as long as you have those three things, uh, measured, you shouldn't face as many issues. When it comes down to deliverability, your results will be 10 out of 10. And until you're scaling up to a larger volume, would I consider using something a little bit more advanced? But that should be more than enough for, I would say, 90% of users. Uh, sending newsletters, at least at this moment.

Speaker A: Awesome. But this has been amazingly helpful. And I know we went through a lot of technical content, and you took the pains to break it down into very simple fifth grade language. So thank you so much for taking us through. I've seen your other interviews as well, Tony. You know, you have been wonderfully patient with all the questions that I've had in store for you. So glad that you took that time. Um, we will probably be back with more guests, but, uh, thank you so much for making time to view this podcast with me and Tony, and we'll see you in yet another episode. Thank you so much. Have a great day.

Speaker B: See you guys.

Speaker A: See you. Ah. All right, let's stop the recording.