Deliverability: how your group's mail reaches inboxes

Community announcements only matter if they arrive. This page explains, concretely, what GetCommunityMail does to keep your group's mail out of junk folders, and the small part that remains yours to do.

What every message carries

Every email we send is authenticated with SPF, DKIM and DMARC, the three standards Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo use to verify a sender is who they claim to be. Every message is sent as multipart (a plain-text version alongside the formatted one), carries your group's name and mailing address, and includes both a visible unsubscribe link and the one-click unsubscribe headers that Gmail and Yahoo require of bulk senders. These are not options to configure; they are how every send works.

How the list stays healthy

Deliverability is mostly list hygiene, so the system enforces it. Addresses that hard-bounce are suppressed automatically and never sent to again. Repeated soft bounces (a full mailbox, a server that keeps timing out) suppress an address after three occurrences. A spam complaint suppresses the address immediately: if a member reports your mail rather than unsubscribing, we stop sending to them at once, because continuing would damage delivery for the whole list. Unsubscribes take effect before the next send, always. And every import requires a recorded consent attestation, because lists of people who never asked to be contacted are where delivery problems begin.

Sending infrastructure

Mail is delivered through dedicated transactional infrastructure with separated streams: your group's announcements travel on a different reputation stream from system messages, so nothing your group does is affected by anyone else's behaviour, and vice versa. Attachments never travel as attachments: files become secure links, which keeps messages small, fast to deliver and free of the payload patterns filters distrust.

The part that is yours

Three habits from your side make a measurable difference, especially in a list's first weeks. Tell members to expect mail from your group's new address, and ask them to add it to their contacts: an address in someone's contacts is delivered to their inbox almost without exception. Start from a current member list rather than an old spreadsheet. And send things worth opening, because providers watch how recipients treat your mail, and mail that members open and read earns inbox placement for everything that follows.

What to expect with a new list

A brand-new list has no history, and providers are cautious with senders they have not seen. In the first week or two a small share of mail may land in junk while reputation builds; members marking it "not junk" corrects this quickly. This is normal for any new sending arrangement anywhere, and it resolves with consistent, wanted mail. If a member reports non-delivery, we can see the exact outcome of every send (delivered, bounced, suppressed) and tell you what happened, which beats guessing.

Questions

Can you guarantee inbox placement? No one honestly can: the receiving provider always has the final say. What we guarantee is that every technical and hygiene factor within a sender's control is handled, which is the whole of what "good deliverability" means in practice.

A member says they never got the email. What now? Ask them to check junk and to add the list address to contacts, and ask your organiser to check the send record: it shows whether that address was delivered to, bounced, or was suppressed, and why.