Deliverability lingo: an explanation of 15 technical terms

When you read about deliverability, you will inevitably run into many complicated terms. There are several factors that affect the end result. The most widely used terms are explained in this article.

Deliverability

Deliverability is an organic consequence of the implementation of best practices to deliver your email into someone’s inbox.

Delivery

The successful delivery of an email to an ISP.

Inbox placement

Whether or not an email ends up in the specific inbox. This is determined by sender reputation.

Inbox engagement

The way in which someone responds to the email affects how relevant the email is.

Hard bounce

A hard bounce is an email message that is sent back to the sender because the receiving address is invalid. A hard bounce can occur because the domain does not exist or because the receiving address is unknown.

Soft bounce

A soft bounce is an email message that reaches the recipient’s mail server, but is returned before it reaches the recipient. One possible cause is the recipient’s inbox being full. A new email sent at a different time may very well be delivered.

DKIM

Domain Keys Identified Mail. This is also called the digital signature. A method to link the domain name to an email, whereby a person or organisation take part of the responsibility for the email. This allows the receiver to recognise the sender.

SPF

Sender Policy Framework. A file one the DNS (domain name server) that indicates whether a certain IP or domain can send emails on behalf of the organisation.

Sender reputation

Reputation of a sender based on previously received messages from the same sender.

Domain reputation

Reputation of the sender’s domain.

IP reputation

Reputation of the individual IP address, which partially determines how successfully your emails will be delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

IP warming

The process whereby you gradually increase the number of emails sent in order to build up an IP reputation.

Honeypot

An email address set up to identify spammers.

Blacklist

An email blacklist is a database that contains IP addresses or domains that are known to be used for sending spam. The email blacklists are maintained by external parties working towards a spam-free internet. Some examples include Spamhaus, Barracuda, SpamCop and Spam Cannibal.

Spam traps

Spam traps are email addresses that have one singular purpose: identifying spammers. They were originally created by internet service providers (ISPs) for that very reason, and were scattered over various web pages without sending so much as a single email.

If such an address ended up receiving an email, it would most likely be spam. After all, someone had most likely searched the internet looking for email addresses. Either that, or someone sent addresses to randomly generated email addresses.

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