What's your stack for sending transactional/outreach email without landing in spam?
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Been wrestling with deliverability lately. Warmup, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, dedicated IPs vs shared, sending volume ramps. It's a deceptively deep rabbit hole.
I'm curious what's actually working for people in 2026 versus the advice that's three years stale.
What's your current setup, and what's the one thing that made the biggest difference to your inbox placement?
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the 2026 reality: deliverability is 80 percent reputation, 20 percent technical. SPF/DKIM/DMARC = table stakes (gets you to neutral, not to inbox).
what actually moves the needle now:
1. separate domains for transactional vs outreach. transactional on mail.yourapp.com dedicated IP. outreach from a separately-warmed cold domain. mixing them poisons both reputations.
2. engagement is the algorithm. Gmail/Outlook score "did the recipient interact with this sender in the last 90 days". so the trick: in the first 60 days of a new domain, only email people you have evidence will reply (current customers, signups, warm leads). teaches the algorithm you are wanted.
3. warmup tools (Mailwarm, Lemwarm) are mostly dead for cold outreach — google flags the patterns. real fix: 25-email/day manual batches for 3 weeks to real recipients only.
4. the big one that moved the needle for me: stop sending HTML emails to outreach. plain text plus signature only. removes 30 spam triggers and the personal-feel ranks higher in modern reply algorithms.
stale advice to drop: "avoid spam words" (matters way less now), "A/B test subject lines" (lower priority than WHO you email). the modern focus is list quality + engagement loop.
One thing that helped us was treating domain reputation as a product metric, not an infrastructure task. We stopped optimizing for send volume and started optimizing for positive engagement (opens, replies, low complaints). That shift alone improved inbox placement more than any DNS tweak. SPF/DKIM/DMARC are essential, but reputation is what compounds over time.
The thing that helped us most was not a technical setting but who we send to. We only email people who signed up and agreed to hear from us, and only from our own authenticated domain (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), through Brevo for transactional mail. That keeps our volume low and complaints near zero, which seems to matter more than warmup or dedicated IPs. So my one thing is permission first.
@alieksia That's a great point. It's easy to get caught up in the technical side of deliverability, but list quality and recipient intent probably have a bigger impact in the long run.
For transactional emails especially, sending only to people who opted in makes maintaining a strong sender reputation much easier. Thanks for sharing your setup with Brevo as well it’s a good reminder that solid fundamentals often beat chasing every new deliverability tactic.