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A beginner-friendly map of email deliverability

#email#deliverability#learning


Here is the mental model that finally made email click for me.

The three trust records

  • SPF says which servers are allowed to send for your domain.
  • DKIM is a cryptographic signature proving a message wasn’t tampered with.
  • DMARC ties them together and tells inboxes what to do if checks fail.

Why a separate sending subdomain

If you blast a lot of email and people mark it as spam, your domain’s reputation drops. Sending from a dedicated subdomain (like send.example.com) keeps that risk away from your primary address. Reputation is built per-(sub)domain.

This is the setup I’m using for this very newsletter.


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