Email deliverability

Email deliverability is whether the messages you send actually reach the recipient's inbox rather than their spam folder or nowhere at all. For link-building outreach it is the constraint that decides whether any of the work is seen.

Also called: sender reputation, inbox placement, mailbox warm-up, SPF DKIM DMARC

Last reviewed October 4, 2026

It is governed largely by sender reputation, which mailbox providers build from how recipients treat your mail: opens and replies help, spam complaints and deletions without reading hurt, and messages to addresses that do not exist hurt considerably. Reputation attaches to both your sending domain and your IP, and it is slow to build and quick to damage.

Three DNS records are table stakes: SPF, which lists who may send for your domain; DKIM, which cryptographically signs your mail; and DMARC, which tells providers what to do when the first two fail. Since 2024 Google and Yahoo have required all three from bulk senders, and mail without them is increasingly not delivered at all.

For outreach specifically, two operational habits matter more than any tool. Warm up a new mailbox by ramping volume gradually over weeks rather than sending at full rate immediately, and keep volumes low enough that replies remain a meaningful share of sends - because a program whose reply rate collapses is destroying the asset it depends on, and a burned domain is not quickly recoverable.

Common questions

Should link-building outreach send from my own domain?

Sending from your real domain and mailbox is what makes outreach credible to a recipient, and it is how Outlink AI works - over OAuth, from your own Gmail or Outlook. The tradeoff is that your primary domain's reputation is genuinely at stake, which is why volume caps and warm-up limits matter rather than being optional settings.

Related terms

Link building outreach

Link building outreach (often just "link outreach") is contacting the people who run other websites - editors, writers, site owners - to give them a genuine reason to link to your content. It is how most deliberately earned links begin, and it succeeds or fails on relevance rather than volume.

Link building

Link building is the practice of getting other websites to link to yours, because search engines treat a link from one site to another as a signal that the destination is worth showing to searchers.

Link velocity

Link velocity is the rate at which a site gains new backlinks over time. It is a descriptive measure SEOs track, not a documented Google ranking factor or a threshold anyone can quote.

Guest posting

Guest posting is writing an article for someone else's publication, usually including a link back to your own site. It remains a legitimate tactic when the article is written for that publication's audience rather than produced primarily to place a link.

AI link building

AI link building is the use of AI models to do parts of link-building work - finding and qualifying prospects, finding contacts, drafting personalized outreach, sorting replies and checking placements - while a person at the linking site still decides whether to add the link.