Email Deliverability Risks & Best Practices - Avoid the Danger Zones

Sep 16, 2026

Upload by Aurelia

Email Deliverability Risks & Best Practices explains why email placement in recipients’ inboxes—not spam folders or block-lists—depends on safe sending practices. It identifies high-risk behaviors, including purchasing or sharing lists, sudden volume spikes, image-heavy emails, missing unsubscribe options, and sending from unauthenticated domains. It also covers URL and link issues such as exposed tracking URLs and URL shorteners, then addresses the impact of sending to unengaged subscribers on engagement signals used by ISPs.

LanguageEnglish

CategoryLetters

FormatPDF

Pages5

Reading Time2 min

AccessFree to download

Why Email Deliverability Matters

12 Risky Email Deliverability Practices

Risky practices overview

Consequences and sender reputation impact

Medium-risk Categories

Sending to unengaged individuals

Engagement signals and ISP behavior

Email Deliverability Risks & Best Practices: Avoid the Danger Zones By: Amanda DeLuke Why is email deliverability so important? It’s how your emails get to your recipients’ inboxes instead of ending up in the spam folder or being block-listed. Your hard work on your content and subject line will pay off when your email hits the inbox and is opened, but what if it doesn’t make it that far? You need to be informed about potential risks you’re taking with your emails. Sometimes, you may not realize you were even taking a risk! Maintaining high deliverability during COVID- 19 has been even more confusing, so it’s more important than ever to stay up-to-date. Learn about the risks that can jeopardize your deliverability, and best practices you can follow to keep deliverability high. I’ll cover: • Risky Email Deliverability Practices • Email Deliverability Best Practices & Industry Trends • Scoring Your Risks Here’s the bottom line: Know the consequences when taking a risk and don’t forget what their outcomes teach you. 12 RISKY EMAIL DELIVERABILITY PRACTICES Let’s dive into the high-risk activities that will jeopardize your email reaching the inbox. 1. Sending to Purchased/Rented/Leased/Shared Lists Even if you’re using list validation, buying, renting, or sharing an email list is a big no-no, and a risk you want to avoid. This practice is detrimental to your sender reputation and against our own rules of use. Why? When you do this, you run the risk of taking down an entire sending system. You may feel comfortable with it using list validation, but list validation still isn’t checking for consent of the individuals, doesn’t find all the spam traps or honeypots, and may still be using role addresses (like [name@xyz.org](name@xyz.org)) which means you may not have proper consent for all individuals on that distribution list. You know what they say… if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. While it maybe tempting to send marketing emails to purchased lists of contacts, it’s a major risk that you should avoid. 2. Volume Spikes Sending out an email to a large group of addresses that you have never contacted before or haven’t contacted in over three months is an example of a volume spike. You may have done this accidentally with a “happy holidays” email. Contacting unengaged email addresses like this out of the blue can cause your deliverability rate to plummet. I recommend maintaining consistency in your sending. If you’re going to send to a list without recent engagement history, send the message more slowly and in smaller batches to gauge delivery rates before it causes harm to your sender reputation 3. Email Contains Mostly Images Sending image-heavy or image-only emails is a huge red flag because it makes receivers think you’re using a technique called image mapping. Spammers use image mapping to try to hide text within an image because it can’t be scanned. If you want to use an image as the basis foryour email, consider breaking up the image and putting some text beneath each image or putting the image into the header and putting text content into the body. 4. No Unsubscribe Mechanism You want to have a clear, easy, compliant way for people to unsubscribe from your emails. I always tell people the worst thing that can happen to you is when someone marks you as spam – and if you don’t have an obvious way to unsubscribe, watch out. You can bet that mail receivers, spam filters, and ISPs look at all that data. 5. Not Sending Mail from Your Organization’s Domain Avoid sending from domains like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. Why? These domains aren’t owned or authenticated by you. It’s best to use your own authenticated domain. There’s a mechanism called DMARC that prevents people from using that domain outside of their system. 6. Exposed URLs Using exposed URLS comes up a lot as a reason for email bounces. It’s because if you include any type of tracking in your URLs and you hove

FAQs

Why is email deliverability important?

Email deliverability determines whether emails reach recipients’ inboxes instead of ending up in spam folders or being block-listed. Higher deliverability helps emails get opened and supported by engagement signals.

What are major risky practices to avoid?

Avoid purchased or shared lists, volume spikes to uncontacted addresses, emails that are mostly images, missing unsubscribe mechanisms, and sending from unowned or unauthenticated domains. These behaviors can harm sender reputation and increase risk.

How do exposed URLs and link shorteners affect deliverability?

Exposed tracking URLs can resemble phishing attempts to spam-filter systems, leading to bounces or filtering. Link shorteners are often block-listed and can hide destination URLs, which increases suspicion.

Sep 16, 2026

Upload by Aurelia