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emailrules.today
Stop 5 of 8Week oneThe same second

Engagement

What recipients actually do with your mail — the signal providers weight most heavily when choosing the folder.

Say it out loud

“Whether people actually want our email. It decides the folder more than anything technical does, and it is not the open rate.”

Mailbox providers watch behaviour you cannot see: what a Gmail user does inside Gmail. Replies, clicks, dragging a message out of spam and reading without deleting all count for you. Reporting spam, deleting unread and long silence count against. Their picture of your audience is better than yours, which is exactly why your dashboard can look healthy while placement falls.

In your dataWhat actually counts, and what you can seeOur framing
FOR YOUreply · click · drag out of spam · add to contacts

Moving a message out of the spam folder is the strongest positive signal a person can send, and no dashboard will ever show it to you.

AGAINST YOUReport spam · delete unread · months of silence
NEITHERthe open, since September 2021

Partly machines. Building a segment on it keeps the dead and drops the living.

You can seeopens (dirty) · clicks · unsubscribes · complaints
They can seeall of that, plus everything above

This asymmetry is the whole reason a send can look fine to you and land in spam.

No provider publishes how these are weighted. What every one of them publishes is the instruction to send to people who want it.

Yours

Nobody does this for you.

What goes wrong

Building the “engaged” segment on opens. Since Apple began prefetching images, an inactive Apple Mail address looks engaged and a genuinely interested reader with images off looks dead, so the segment quietly inverts.

What people get told

The claim. “If our authentication is right, we will reach the inbox.”

Actually. Authentication makes you eligible to be considered. It answers who you are, and every provider requires it. It says nothing about whether anyone wants the mail, and a perfectly authenticated message to a list nobody reads goes to spam. Passing SPF, DKIM, DMARC and alignment is the floor, not the outcome.

The dated rules behind this

A definition is not a citation. These are the pages with the primary source, the date it was published, and what to do about it.

See also

Where this sits

Stop 5, reputation decides. Having proved who you are, you find out whether they want you — and that is mostly about your history, not this message.

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