Email deliverability, the long tail
The daily work: bounce diagnostics, SPF/DKIM/DMARC alignment, tracing why one recipient’s server decided today was the day. And the documentation that keeps the same question from being asked three times.
Deliverability is mostly patience and knowing which log to open. I’ve spent most of a decade getting fast at reading NDRs, correlating send events with recipient behavior, and explaining DMARC alignment to people who’ve never heard of it in a way that doesn’t make them feel bad.
The work that compounds is writing it down. Internal runbooks for the ten most common bounce patterns, a DMARC-for-customers explainer that’s been linked in a few thousand tickets, and a decision tree for ‘is this a customer config issue or ours’.
SPF · DKIM · DMARC · NDR forensics · Postmaster tools