Asking for a Friend: What’s the Difference Between Email Delivery and Email Deliverability?

Asking For a Friend is a blog series where we take the buzzwords, acronyms and trending terms flooding your marketing feeds and explain them in plain English. No jargon, no fluff, just the stuff you actually need to know. 

The email marketing realm can be a confusing place full of what seems like hundreds of terms that require years of “insider” knowledge to fully understand.

We want to help demystify some of those confusing topics and industry “secrets”. In this blog, we’ll focus on the difference between email delivery versus email deliverability, some of the technical specifications that help your emails find their way to the inbox, and the latest changes in the email space.

What’s the difference between email delivery and deliverability?

To gauge your email delivery, look closely at your tracking data. A “delivery” rate of 98% seems great on the surface, but what that’s really telling you is that 98% of your messages didn’t bounce back. It’s not accounting for where the mail actually landed (inbox, spam folder, discarded), that’s where deliverability comes into play.

Email deliverability is a broader picture of the overall health of your sending. In a nutshell, it’s the sender’s ability to reach the inbox. Your deliverability success is controlled by your sending reputation, which looks at a number of factors including:

• authentication of your “From” address
• volume frequency associated with your domain and sending IP(s)
• subscriber engagement rates

Authentication is the technical precursor to any successful email campaign. Most mailbox providers (e.g. Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail) require multiple authentication elements to be in place in order to even consider inbox delivery to their users. The current standard for email authentication includes:

• SPF: Sender Policy Framework. This is a text record in the Domain Name System (DNS) that contains a list of IP addresses allowed to send mail on behalf of your domain name. Think of it as an “approved sender” list for your domain.
  
• DKIM: DomainKeys Identified Mail. This cryptographic-based signature is added to messages using a public and private key pairing. This method allows the server sending your message to add verification in the header that your company was the legitimate sender of the message.
  
• DMARC: Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting & Conformance. This is a DNS record that allows the domain owner to set usage “policy” regarding how unauthenticated mail is treated. Messages that don’t pass SPF and DKIM checks never reach subscriber inboxes. This helps to protect your brand.

You’ve got your authentication strategy all planned out for any and all domains you plan to send from. Now it’s time to think about the next piece of sending reputation, which is the frequency you plan to send mail at. The most successful marketing programs tend to give some amount of control to their subscribers in this regard. 

Often, during the opt-in process, you can allow a customer to select not only the type of content they’ll receive (for example, newsletter, marketing, etc.), but also the frequency ( daily, weekly, monthly) and the delivery method ( email, SMS, WhatsApp). Giving this level of control to the subscriber accomplishes a few different things:

• helps reduce spam complaints (subscriber flags a message as “junk” or “unsolicited” using their mailbox provider’s “Report Spam” button)
  
• drives trust with your brand
  
• prevents subscriber fatigue in a crowded inbox

Once you have your list compiled and know your send frequency, you can plan out what’s commonly referred to as a warming effort. Both your domain(s) and sending IP(s) are “cold” in terms of send history and the specific type of content you will be sending, this means even if you are using shared IP space, you still need to slowly expose your new domain(s) to the mailbox providers and build reputation over time.

The final and ongoing factor of success in email marketing are your subscriber engagement rates. Mailbox providers are tracking how their users interact with your messages and that data all feeds into an algorithm that dictates whether they will block your messages or accept them onto their servers. Accepting the message doesn’t guarantee it will be seen, though. Many mailbox providers use folder structures in their inbox, and, of course, there’s always the dreaded spam folder. 

Highly personalized content and the introduction of Conversational Email are meant to drive engagement rates. The traditional tracking of open and click counts have lost their value in this regard.

Marketers get a much more accurate look at engagement rates by diving into conversion data and using that to narrow down their engaged subscriber base with a proactive sunsetting (the strategic process of identifying inactive email subscribers — those not opening or clicking emails—and either re-engaging them or removing them from your list) approach.

5 hot trends in email deliverability 

Let’s dive into some of the latest industry trends and break down how each could impact your deliverability.

AI Summaries: Gmail (Gemini Summaries), Yahoo (Catch Up), Microsoft (Copilot) and Apple Mail (Apple Intelligence Summaries) have all introduced AI summaries to their inbox solutions. More mailbox providers are likely to follow suit in the coming years.

AI summaries tend to look at the first 20 characters of a subject line and first 100 characters of an email body to compose a condensed version of the email context. These summaries may lead to decreased open and click rates over time as subscribers become more confident in the quality of the output.

AI Inbox: Specific to Gmail, this feature integrates Gemini into the inbox solution to act as a personal assistant allowing you to search across folders, ask questions about details from email history and get an AI overview of any actionable items. This further decreases the need for a subscriber to open or click in the actual email and drives the importance of tracking conversion data.

Manage Subscriptions View: Subscription Center is a feature that started rolling out in June/July 2025 to Gmail users. The feature makes it easy for users to see how many emails they’re getting from a company/sender (sorted by the highest number of emails), and, with a couple of clicks, unsubscribe from that sender without ever having to open a message.

For a marketer, being aware of just how often you’re hitting a subscribers mailbox becomes crucial as this can lead to negative perception of a brand and increased unsubscribe rates.

BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification): This puts your logo next to the email in the inbox, which helps with the “AI Summaries” issue by increasing brand recognition at a glance. BIMI can improve open rates and engagement, which in turn improves sender reputation.

Google Annotations: Annotations are meant to help you showcase your products directly in the Promotions folder with images, deals, and expiration dates.

How it all ties together

You should ensure all the necessary authentication is in place on sending domains and plan a warming effort to establish reputation with the mailbox providers. This keeps the subscriber opt-in preferences front and center. Design your emails with the AI summaries in mind:

• Key points in text as opposed to images
• Subject lines that get to the point in the first 20 characters
• Don’t confuse the AI, keep your message on point 

Once you start sending, it should be at a slow, methodical pace building toward your full audience volumes. Prioritize engaged subscribers and keep content personalized and relevant to what they opted in to receive (at the cadence the subscriber agreed to/expects).

Pay attention to subscriber signals, spam complaints or elevated unsubscribe rates that suggest you’ve missed the mark with your audience or content. Remember, this is an ongoing cycle, not a set and forget situation. 

With a continued focus on your most engaged subscribers, you’ll see improved deliverability, which will also keep your delivery rates high. Deliverability isn’t a goal you reach – it’s a standard you maintain. By prioritizing authentication, respecting subscriber intent and adapting to the AI-driven inbox, you aren’t just sending emails — you’re building a reliable bridge to your customers.