Email deliverability

When you send an email, there is no guarantee it reaches the recipient's inbox. Inbox providers like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and iCloud invest heavily in filtering out unwanted email. If you send poorly targeted emails, have high bounce rates, or trigger spam complaints, these providers may flag your domain as untrustworthy. Once that happens, even your legitimate emails can end up in spam or be blocked outright.

This concept is referred to as email deliverability: maintaining a healthy sending reputation so that inbox providers trust your emails. Cloudflare Email Service helps with this by automatically handling bounces, managing suppression lists, and authenticating your emails through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Bounces occur when emails cannot be delivered to recipients. There are two types of bounces: hard bounces and soft bounces.

Hard bounces are permanent delivery failures that occur when:

• The recipient address does not exist.
• The recipient domain does not exist.
• The receiving server permanently rejects the recipient.

Hard bounces are never retried because the failure is permanent. Emails that hard bounce will generate a bounce notification to the sender address and can be monitored through analytics.

Email Service adds eligible recipient-side hard bounces to your suppression list. Suppressions have no expiration when the mailbox or domain does not exist.

They also have no expiration when the recipient remains unavailable across repeated delivery attempts. Other eligible hard-bounce suppressions last seven days.

Soft bounces are temporary failures that may succeed if retried:

• Recipient mailbox is full
• Email server temporarily down
• Rate limiting or greylisting

Cloudflare automatically retries soft bounces with exponential backoff. Eligible recipient-side failures create a 24-hour suppression.

Cloudflare automatically manages:

• IP reputation: Managed sending infrastructure optimized for deliverability
• Domain authentication: DKIM signing, SPF alignment, DMARC compliance
• Feedback processing: ISP complaint handling and suppression list management

Avoid content that can trigger spam-detection or can be perceived as unwanted content:

• Avoid spam trigger words (FREE, URGENT, GUARANTEED)
• Include both HTML and plain text versions
• Use legitimate URLs and clear sender identification

Ensure that your email lists are clean and contain intended recipients:

• Validate emails before sending
• Implement double opt-in for subscriptions
• Remove hard bounced addresses immediately

Ensure that your deliverability stays above key metrics to avoid affecting your email sending reputation:

• Delivery rate >95%
• Hard bounce rate < 2%
• Complaint rate < 0.1%

Each domain builds its own deliverability reputation with inbox providers. Use separate domains or subdomains for different types of email so that one category does not affect the reputation of another. For example:

• notifications.yourdomain.com for transactional emails (order confirmations, password resets)
• marketing.yourdomain.com for marketing and promotional emails
• yourdomain.com for important account-related communications

This way, if marketing emails generate higher complaint rates, your transactional email deliverability is not impacted. Each domain can be onboarded separately through domain configuration.

Inbox providers weight domain sending history heavily. A domain with low sending volume or no prior history has no positive reputation signal for providers to draw on. Providers treat new senders cautiously regardless of whether authentication passes.

If your domain is new or has a low sending volume, inbox placement problems are common during an initial period while you build a sending history. New accounts also start with conservative sending limits that increase as your account builds a sending history. Refer to Limits.

To build domain reputation:

1. Start at a low, steady volume and increase gradually over several weeks.
2. Send only to recipients who expect the message. High engagement (replies, clicks, and moving messages to the inbox) improves your reputation.
3. Keep a consistent From address and sender name for each sending domain.
4. Link only to your own domain in message bodies. Third-party redirect services and URL shorteners can lower your reputation score.
5. Ask early recipients to move messages from junk to their inbox or mark them Not Junk or Not Spam. User actions are the strongest positive signal for most providers.