Do you have a deliverability problem? Do I?

That screenshot above is from an email message that I received recently. I get a lot of wacky emails, but this one takes it to a whole new level. This person did not research his target very well, and I find the content to be borderline deceptive. They are careful to say "I have results about" not "I see that you're having trouble" to sort of hedge the bet, as if to say "I have information about your spam folder percentage" only to find out that the percentage is zero, and to be met with the defense "but zero is a percent."

This is silly. And I share this silliness not to name and shame (note that I have not shared the sender's last name or company), but to point out that you can't always trust everything that people tell you. In this case, I run my own dedicated MTA, with a dedicated IP address, from which I send Spam Resource newsletters, XNND email alerts and notifications, various other newsletters, test emails for my employer's inbox placement testing, and I even host a few different email discussion lists. A certain 0-100 scoring of IP reputation seems to show my server has having a great 99/100 score consistently, and classifies the server as a "high" volume sender of mail.

I've had deliverability issues from time to time (don't we all?), but I tend to catch them pretty quickly, given the inbox testing I'm constantly doing. Whether a tiny mailbox provider in a far off land starts blocking my mail because it decided to fingerprint it as spammy out of nowhere, or something weird happens and a certain big ISP can't resolve my SPF record (for mail from a server where I forgot to enable DKIM -- oops!), I tend to catch these kind of things quickly and I get them fixed. That, and yeah, like happens to everybody else, too, sometimes Microsoft wants to put my mail in the spam folder, for no reason clear to me. But nothing like that is going on currently -- everything seems to be going just fine right now, knock on wood.

So, yeah. My emails are indeed reaching my customers, my friends, my readers, and your mom.

But that's me. I'm watching deliverability like a hawk. Others, not so much. Maybe you don't have the time, tools or expertise. Where do you even begin to start troubleshooting or testing? How does one tell if one has a deliverability problem? Timing is everything -- and I swear that I didn't plan it this way -- it just happened that my esteemed Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz just authored a blog post on this very topic: Do you have a deliverability problem? It is an excellent read, and it will help school you on how to measure these types of things for yourself, so that you don't have to take somebody else's word for it. Click on through to read it here.