Get your newsletters delivered

Whether an email lands in the inbox is decided mostly by your sending reputation and how recipients engage — opens, clicks, replies, deletes and spam reports — not by magic keywords. The content checks below matter, but the foundation is sending mail people asked for, from a domain that vouches for you.

The foundation: identity and reputation

• Send from your verified domain. pplCRM requires this before any broadcast — it is what lets Gmail and Outlook trust the mail is really yours.
• Add a DMARC record. It is optional for verification but Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft require it of bulk senders; even a monitor-only policy (p=none) counts. Your DNS checklist under Workspace → Domains shows the record.
• Keep your identity steady. Same from-name and address every send, a regular cadence, and no sudden jumps in volume.
• Watch your reputation where the inboxes do. Enroll your domain in [Google Postmaster Tools](https://postmaster.google.com) — keep the spam-rate graph under 0.1% and never past 0.3%.

List quality beats everything

• Only email people who opted in through your forms, events or sign-ups. Purchased and scraped lists bounce hard, get reported, and trip the automatic pauses.
• Unsubscribes and bounces are honored automatically — never re-import around them.
• Consider double opt-in on public forms, and rest people who have not opened anything in months; mailing the unengaged drags down delivery for everyone else on your list.

Content habits the check scores

• Subject: sentence case, under ~70 characters, no stacked exclamation marks or currency symbols, and never a fake “Re:”.
• Body: keep the HTML under ~100KB (Gmail clips beyond that and hides your footer), and keep a healthy balance of real text to images. A plain-text version is generated automatically for every send.
• Images: host them on regular https:// URLs, keep each roughly 600px wide and comfortably under 200KB, and give every image alt text — that is what people see while images load or stay blocked.
• Links: link real destinations on domains you control — no URL shorteners, no bare IP addresses, and make the visible text match where the link goes.

How the deliverability check scores you

The check starts at 100 and subtracts points per finding, each shown with its cost and fix. 80+ is ready to send, 50–79 is worth fixing first, and below 50 sending is disabled. The full check adds a spam-filter (SpamAssassin) score and an AI read of the copy that flags deceptive patterns — manufactured urgency, misleading claims, look-alike links — and content outside the acceptable-use policy. Fundraising appeals, donation asks, auctions and event promotion are all normal newsletter content here; unrelated commercial product blasts and anything phishing-shaped are not.