Cold email deliverability
Cold email deliverability is the share of your outbound cold emails that actually reach the recipient's inbox (not spam, not blocked). It depends on domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), sender reputation, mailbox warmup, list hygiene and content — not just whether the email was 'sent'.
How it works
Mailbox providers score each sending domain and IP on engagement, complaint rate, authentication and volume patterns. Good scores land you in the inbox; bad ones route you to spam or block you outright.
Why it matters
A campaign with 'sent' status but 30% inbox placement is mostly invisible. Deliverability is the multiplier on every other metric — open, reply and meeting rates all collapse if placement is poor.
How Autocloz handles it
Autocloz ships 21-day mailbox warmup, DMARC/DKIM/SPF monitoring and inbox-placement tests, plus per-domain rotation and sending caps — so placement is managed, not guessed.
FAQ
How do I improve cold email deliverability?
Authenticate your domain (SPF/DKIM/DMARC), warm up mailboxes for ~3 weeks, keep lists clean (verify before sending), rotate across mailboxes, and watch complaint + bounce rates. Autocloz automates the warmup + monitoring.
Does warmup actually help?
Warmup builds early engagement signals on a new domain/mailbox so providers trust it before you ramp volume. It's necessary but not sufficient — authentication and list hygiene matter just as much.
Related terms
DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance) is an email standard that tells receiving mail servers what to do with messages that fail SPF or DKIM checks — and sends you reports. It prevents spoofing of your domain and is now effectively required by Gmail and Yahoo for bulk senders.
SPF (Sender Policy Framework) is an email-authentication standard that lets a domain owner publish, in DNS, the list of mail servers allowed to send email on the domain's behalf. Receiving servers check the sending IP against that list to help detect spoofing and decide whether to trust the message.
DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is an email-authentication method that attaches a cryptographic signature to each message. The receiving server verifies the signature against a public key in the sender's DNS, proving the message wasn't altered in transit and genuinely came from the signing domain.
Mailbox warmup is the practice of gradually increasing a new email account's sending volume while generating positive engagement (opens, replies, moving mail out of spam) so mailbox providers build trust in the sender before real campaigns ramp up.