Signals
Field notes on email deliverability — what the hiring market, the inbox, and the shift to AI-mediated email reveal about where mail breaks and who's fixing it.
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We measured the Fortune 50's email cryptography. More than half publish a 1024-bit DKIM key.
A Cryptographic Bill of Materials for the Fortune 50's email, resolved from public DNS: DNSSEC 6 of 50, DANE 0, MTA-STS 2 — and 28 of 50 companies publish at least one 1024-bit DKIM key, below NIST's minimum since 2013.
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Is my DMARC record still valid under RFC 9989?
DMARC became a Standards Track spec in May 2026. We checked the Fortune 50: a third still carry a tag the new spec removed, none have adopted the ones that replaced it — and forged sender domains still feed $3.05B/yr in reported BEC losses.
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Your bounce rate isn't a sending problem. It's a list problem.
Read enough deliverability job postings and a pattern shows up: half of them aren't asking for help with SPF and DKIM. They're asking someone to clean up the list.
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Deliverability just got a director
A large receivables operation created a director-level role whose entire mandate is whether its email lands. When "does our mail arrive" becomes a director's job, deliverability has become a P&L function — not a config setting.
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A new platform doesn't inherit your good name
Fortune Media is moving off Salesforce Marketing Cloud; Poshmark is standing up a new engagement platform. Re-platform your stack and you reset the one asset that can't be migrated — sender reputation.
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Nobody emails you an error when your SPF breaks
A week of email-operations job postings keeps hiring the same role — a human alarm for silent SPF/DKIM/DMARC drift. It's a regression your CI can catch on its own.
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Your AI sequencer scaled the sending. It didn't scale the landing.
Read past the title: ApartmentIQ's new "Email Marketing Manager" is really hiring someone to keep an AI-sequencer outbound machine — 20 reps, Clay, Smartlead — out of spam.
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When email drives revenue, someone has to own whether it lands
Read past the job title and both postings are assigning the same thing: make the email that drives our revenue actually arrive.
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Replit's first lifecycle hire is a deliverability story
The job description quietly admits what most growth-stage companies won't: nobody owns whether the email actually arrives.