Email deliverability for publishers and media
Where the addresses come from
- Newsletter signups from article pages, the core signup channel and mostly good quality.
- Paywall and sign-up walls, where people enter an address to read one piece and never return.
- Lead magnets and reports, which attract throwaway addresses at a steady rate.
- Archived lists from previous platforms, carrying addresses on domains that stopped existing years ago.
Daily frequency magnifies everything
Send daily and a placement problem costs you thirty sends a month rather than two. Reputation feedback loops run faster, both downward when something breaks and upward when it is fixed.
Open rate is also the product. Advertising revenue is priced against audience engagement, so a message in the junk folder is directly lost revenue rather than a delayed conversion.
Long-running lists carry the deepest decay in any sector. A newsletter that has run since 2010 holds addresses on ISP domains that no longer exist and free webmail accounts abandoned during a previous decade.
What the results tend to look like
Consumer-heavy and wide. Long-running publisher lists are where the most obscure domains show up: defunct ISPs, regional webmail, and legacy addresses from services that were acquired twice. Domain-level failures are a larger share here than anywhere else.
What to do about it
Build engagement rules on clicks rather than opens
Apple Mail Privacy Protection records opens for messages nobody read, so an open-based sunsetting policy never removes anyone.
Sunset aggressively, because frequency makes silence expensive
A daily send to someone who has not clicked in a year is thirty monthly signals to mailbox providers that your mail is unwanted.
Check archived lists before reactivating them
A list that has not been mailed since a platform migration carries every year of decay at once.
Watch domain-level failures on old lists
Defunct ISP domains fail at the DNS stage rather than the mailbox stage, which is a fast and confident result on data this old.
Questions people ask
Why is open rate shaky for publishers?
Apple Mail Privacy Protection preloads images through a proxy for most Apple Mail users, recording an open whether or not anyone read the message. Any engagement rule built on opens is being driven by Apple.
How often should a daily newsletter be checked?
Twice a year is reasonable for an active list, and at once before reactivating anything that has been idle. Daily sending surfaces hard bounces quickly, so the acute problem is usually visible.
Should unengaged subscribers be removed?
In a daily program, yes, more readily than elsewhere. Every send to someone who never opens is another signal, and at daily frequency those accumulate quickly.
Related sectors
See the breakdown on your own list
100 free checks a month, no card. Addresses we could not get an answer on come back labeled rather than guessed at, and we do not bill them.