Deliverability

Every other feature we sell is about getting the right knowledge to the right person at the right moment. Search, briefs, newsletters, alerts. Beautiful machinery.

All of it depends on one unglamorous thing working: the email has to land in the inbox.

If it lands in spam, or in the Promotions tab, or gets quarantined by your own security gateway, then every hour your team spent curating that content was spent producing something nobody will ever see. Your engagement numbers will say the program is failing. Your executives will say they never hear from the insights team. And the actual cause will be an authentication record nobody has looked at since 2019.

So we built deliverability as a real part of the product rather than assuming it would sort itself out. This page explains what that means.

What we do on our side

Authenticated sending infrastructure. We handle SPF, DKIM, and DMARC alignment for Sharpr-sent mail. These are the three records that tell a receiving mail server that a message claiming to come from your domain is legitimate. When they are misconfigured, mail from your own platform gets treated as a forgery attempt, which is technically correct behavior and practically a disaster.

Reputation management. Sending IP and domain reputation are monitored continuously. Enterprise mail, sent in bursts to large internal lists, has a different signature from consumer marketing mail, and infrastructure tuned for the latter handles the former badly.

Bounce and complaint handling. Hard bounces are processed and suppressed automatically. Departed employees and invalid addresses do not sit on your list degrading your reputation for two years, which is what happens when a distribution list is maintained by hand.

Rate and volume management. Large sends are paced so that a newsletter going to 8,000 people does not look like an attack to their mail server. This is a solved problem, but only if somebody solves it.

Per-message diagnostics. We tell you what was delivered, what bounced, what soft-bounced, and where delivery failed. Opens are increasingly unreliable to measure. Delivery is the thing that determines whether the program works.

What we do on your side

Most enterprise deliverability problems are inside the recipient's organization, which in our case is usually the same organization as the sender. Your own security stack is the primary obstacle.

Domain and DNS setup with your IT team. During onboarding, your customer experience manager works with your IT group on the authentication records for your sending domain. This is a one-time task, it takes a short conversation, and it is the single highest-return thing we do in an implementation.

Gateway and filter allowlisting. Microsoft Defender, Proofpoint, Mimecast, and their peers are doing their job when they hold an unfamiliar bulk sender. We provide the documentation your security team needs to allowlist properly, at the level of specificity they will ask for.

Tenant-level configuration. Focused Inbox, clutter rules, and tab sorting in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace can quietly bury internal mail. We know where these settings live and what to ask for.

Ongoing monitoring. If delivery rates drop after a change to your mail environment, which happens, we see it in the data and raise it rather than waiting for you to notice that engagement has quietly declined.

Use cases, by the person who cares about this

The insights leader whose program is "not working"

You believe adoption is poor. Engagement is flat. The executive team says they never see anything from your team.

Before you redesign the program, check delivery. We have onboarded organizations where the previous platform's mail had been silently quarantined for months. The content was good. The curation was good. Nothing arrived. Fixing delivery produced an overnight step change that no amount of editorial improvement would have achieved.

The IT and security team asked to approve another sender

You have a legitimate objection to adding external senders, and you should. We give you documentation, authentication records, source ranges, and a security contact. We support DMARC alignment rather than asking you to weaken your policy for our convenience, because a vendor asking you to relax DMARC is a vendor telling you something about their engineering.

The chief of staff sending to the executive committee

Ten recipients, all senior, all with heavily managed inboxes, some with executive assistants filtering on their behalf. The brief has to arrive and it has to arrive on time Monday morning.

Small lists are not automatically easy. Executive inboxes tend to have the most aggressive filtering in the company. We treat this list as high priority during setup precisely because the audience has zero tolerance for missing mail and no patience for being asked to check their spam folder.

The competitive intelligence manager sending time-sensitive alerts

An alert that arrives four hours late has lost most of its value. Delivery timing is monitored, not assumed, and we can tell you whether the delay was on our side or in your gateway. That distinction matters when you need to get it fixed.

The member association emailing thousands of external recipients

External distribution is a harder problem than internal. Thousands of recipients across hundreds of receiving domains, each with its own filtering, plus list hygiene requirements and unsubscribe handling. Segmentation, suppression management, and reputation monitoring all matter more at this scale, and they are all handled.

The agency or consulting firm delivering to client inboxes

Your deliverables land at your client's domain, which means your client's security stack is judging you. Getting allowlisted at the start of an engagement, with your client's IT team, is a small conversation that prevents a recurring embarrassment.

The numbers that should be on your dashboard

Most teams measure open rate, which has become a noisy metric since mail providers began pre-fetching images. We report on it because it is directionally useful over time, but we push customers to watch three other numbers first.

Delivery rate. Of what you sent, how much reached a mailbox. This should be high. If it is not, nothing downstream matters and every other metric is meaningless.

Bounce rate and type. Hard bounces mean list hygiene problems. Soft bounces mean capacity or temporary rejection. Rising soft bounces from a single domain usually means a policy change on their end that you want to know about immediately.

Click-through to the hub. The most honest engagement signal we have, because it requires a deliberate action and cannot be triggered by an image cache. A click means someone read enough to want the source.

What we are not

We are not a mail server. We do not replace your corporate email. We send from authenticated infrastructure into your existing environment.

We are not able to fix a filtering policy we cannot see. If your security team declines to allowlist and declines to discuss it, mail will be held, and that is a conversation inside your organization rather than a product problem. We will give you everything you need to have that conversation productively.

We are not going to promise you a delivery rate on a marketing page. Anyone who does is quoting an average that has nothing to do with your mail environment. We will tell you your actual numbers, continuously, and work the problems when they appear.

Objections we hear, answered

"This is just email. Why is there a page about it?" Because in our experience it is the most common silent cause of a knowledge program appearing to fail, and because most vendors in this category treat it as somebody else's problem. We would rather bore you on this page than lose your program to a spam filter.

"Our IT team will not allowlist a vendor." They will allowlist a properly authenticated sender with documentation, which is why we lead with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC rather than asking for a blanket exception. Security teams say no to vague requests and yes to specific ones.

Try this

Open your spam or quarantine folder and search for your own company's internal newsletters, from any system.

If you find something in there that you were supposed to have read, you now understand why we built this. Book a demo and bring your IT lead.