# What is email deliverability? · Leadraft

URL: https://leadraft.co/glossary/email-deliverability
Summary: Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach recipients' inboxes rather than bouncing or landing in spam.

Glossary · Email & deliverability · Last updated October 31, 2026

# Email deliverability

Email deliverability is the ability of your emails to reach recipients' inboxes rather than bouncing or landing in spam.

**Also called:** Inbox placement, Deliverability.

Deliverability has two layers. Delivery is whether the receiving server accepts the message at all; bounces are the failures. Inbox placement is where an accepted message ends up: inbox, promotions, or spam. Most dashboards only show the first.

Mailbox providers decide placement from your sender reputation, authentication, list quality and how recipients respond. Their published requirements set the floor: Google and Yahoo require bulk senders to authenticate with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, keep spam complaints below 0.3%, and support one-click unsubscribe (RFC 8058). Outlook.com requires SPF, DKIM and DMARC for domains sending more than 5,000 emails a day.

For cold email to local businesses, deliverability is mostly decided before you hit send: a separate, authenticated, warmed-up domain; a list of verified addresses with catch-all kept separate; small daily volumes per mailbox; and messages relevant enough that people don't report them.

Common mistakes are judging deliverability by open rates (privacy features make them unreliable), sending everything from one mailbox, and treating a bounce problem as a copywriting problem.

## Example

Two agencies send the same message. One uses a verified list from a warmed, authenticated domain and gets replies; the other uses a bought list from a new domain, bounces at 9%, and its later mail lands in spam.

## Sources

1.  1.[Google, Email sender guidelines](https://support.google.com/a/answer/81126)
2.  2.[Yahoo, Sender best practices](https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/)
3.  3.[Microsoft, Outlook.com Postmaster policies](https://substrate.office.com/ip-domain-management-snds/postmaster/Policies)
4.  4.[IETF, RFC 8058: Signaling One-Click Functionality for List Email Headers](https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc8058)

## Related terms

-   [Sender reputationSender reputation is the trust mailbox providers place in your sending domain and IP, built from complaints, bounces, authentication and engagement.](https://leadraft.co/glossary/sender-reputation)
-   [Bounce rateBounce rate is the percentage of sent emails that were returned as undeliverable; for cold email, under 2% is a sensible target.](https://leadraft.co/glossary/bounce-rate)
-   [SPFSPF (Sender Policy Framework) is a DNS record that lists which servers are allowed to send email for a domain, so receivers can spot forgeries.](https://leadraft.co/glossary/spf)
-   [DKIMDKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a cryptographic signature added to email so receivers can verify which domain sent it and that it wasn't altered.](https://leadraft.co/glossary/dkim)
-   [DMARCDMARC is a DNS policy that tells receivers what to do with mail that fails SPF and DKIM alignment for your domain, and where to send reports.](https://leadraft.co/glossary/dmarc)

## Further reading

-   [What's a good cold email bounce rate?](https://leadraft.co/blog/cold-email-bounce-rate)
-   [How email verification works](https://leadraft.co/blog/how-email-verification-works)
-   [Leadraft for cold email](https://leadraft.co/solutions/cold-email)

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Last built: 2026-11-09