How email infrastructure affects company communication

Is your email strategy a chaotic mess? 🤔 I've seen it too many times, companies sending emails from multiple systems or sources with zero coordination. Marketing emails from one platform. Transactional emails from another. Product notifications from somewhere else entirely. And nobody has a complete picture of what's happening. The result? Customers getting bombarded with mixed messages. Deliverability issues that nobody can solve. And zero visibility into what's actually working. But here's the thing: Your email ecosystem is probably your most valuable customer touchpoint. Yet it's often the most neglected part of your tech stack. The real problem? Most companies have never mapped their entire email architecture. They're flying blind and it's costing them millions in lost revenue and damaged customer relationships. So what's the fix? It starts with a comprehensive 4-layer mapping approach: ✅ Layer 1: Foundation Mapping Identify EVERY system sending emails (marketing, product, support, outreach, etc.) Document ownership, purpose, and infrastructure ✅ Layer 2: Customer Journey Mapping Visualize touchpoints across the entire lifecycle + map triggers, logic, copy, and metrics for each email ✅ Layer 3: Performance Audit Benchmark deliverability health across all providers Measure engagement and attribution metrics ✅ Layer 4: Strategic Architecture Consolidate platforms and simplify infrastructure Introduce AI workflows and fix compliance gaps I've seen companies double their email ROI just by getting visibility into their email ecosystem. And guess what? The companies that master this don't just improve performance - they transform email from a tactical channel into a strategic asset. Your email architecture isn't just a technical concern. It's a business imperative. Map it. Optimize it. And watch your customer experience and engagement soar. What's the most chaotic part of your company's email ecosystem? I'd love to hear in the comments 👇

Don't use a single company domain, instead use a multi-domain strategy. If you're only using one domain for all your B2B email communication, you'll inevitably get in trouble. Here's why: •Single point of failure: Your entire communication stack (invoices, investor updates, customer support) depends on one domain's reputation. •Lengthy recovery: If your domain gets flagged, you could face weeks or months of reduced deliverability while rebuilding your sender reputation. •Missed opportunities: During downtime, critical emails might land in spam folders, potentially costing you deals or important relationships. A more robust approach: -Domain diversification: Set up 2-3 email accounts per domain for different communication purposes (e.g., yourbrand.ai, your-brand.co).  -Admin panels: Set up multiple admin accounts per domain, don't put all your eggs in one basket here. -Warm-up protocol: Implement a 4-6 week warm-up for each new domain, gradually increasing send volume and monitoring key metrics like open rates and spam complaints. -Continuous monitoring: Set up alerts for sudden drops in open rates or increases in bounce rates. Tools like MxToolbox can help automate this process. Track this daily or weekly and watch it closely. -Fallback strategy: Always have at least one "fresh" email in reserve, warmed up and ready to deploy if issues arise with your primary domains. In B2B SaaS, your outbound email infrastructure (ie distribution channel) is as critical as your product. Treat it with the same level of strategic planning and redundancy.

Your outbound isn’t broken. Your delivery is. On a recent call with a prospect, their story felt all too familiar: → Strong offer → Great product → Hyper-relevant messaging → Talented SDR team … yet sub-1% reply rates. They couldn’t understand why. But 5 minutes into the teardown, the culprit was obvious: → They were sending from their main domain. → With open tracking links. → Straight into corporate spam filters. The emails were never reaching the inbox. Here’s the part nobody wants to admit: Most of your emails aren’t getting seen. They’re getting filtered - before your great offer ever has a chance. 👉 Modern email filters don’t care how good your offer is. 👉 They care about the technical quality of your sending. 👉 And if you mess that up? You lose before the race starts. But here’s where most teams go wrong... If your reply rate is under 1%, you probably don’t have a messaging problem. You have a delivery problem. And here’s why: → Sending from your primary domain? You’re flagged (in most cases!) → Using open/click tracking links? You’re flagged. → Over-sending volume on single domains? You’re flagged. → Unclean lists? You’re flagged. Fixing this is not optional anymore. It’s why our first step with any client is to rebuild outbound infrastructure first: → Secondary domains, warmed properly → Multiple domains to spread volume → No tracking links → Clean, segmented data → Inbox placement tests weekly Performance benchmarks monitored religiously Once that’s in place - then we optimize messaging. The result? → Reply rates go from <1% to 4–5%+ → SDRs aren’t wasting time on broken infrastructure → Pipeline grows without scaling headcount The takeaway: Before you tweak your copy, fix your delivery. Most “bad” outbound is just bad plumbing.

Their company newsletter has a 12% open rate. Company-wide emails? 8% engagement. Slack announcements get buried under memes: Meanwhile, employees are asking: "Why didn't anyone tell us about this?" They’re broadcasting into the void. Last month, the communications director watched their CEO spend 20 minutes explaining a major policy change to the leadership team. Detailed walkthrough. Clear rationale. Smart questions from the room. Three days later: "When is someone going to explain this new policy?" Same exact question from five different department heads. That's when it hit the comms team. Distribution is the problem. Months were spent crafting the perfect message. Zero minutes thinking about how people actually consume information. Reality check: - 73% of their workforce works remotely - Average employee checks email twice per day - Most important conversations happen in side channels - People learn about company news from LinkedIn before internal comms Leadership was optimizing for corporate communications playbooks from 2015. But the workforce moved on without them. So the team tried something different. Instead of pushing information down through official channels, they started mapping how information naturally flows. Three discoveries emerged: 1. Team leads are the real communication hubs 2. Staff trust peer updates more than corporate messaging 3. Context matters more than content New approach implemented: - Brief team leads first with talking points - Give them permission to translate corporate speak - Allow conversations to happen organically in existing spaces - Follow up with formal documentation, not formal announcements Results after two months: - Policy awareness up - Employee questions down - Actual engagement with company updates increased Employees don't ignore communications, but ad communications systems are what get ignored. Better emails aren't the solution, building better information flow is.

We all know email’s not “set and forget”, but how many of us are really keeping up with the maintenance? I've seen so many email programs suffer because critical infrastructure updates get pushed to the back burner. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," they say. And then... well, things break. 😬 My colleague, Brian Godiksen, just wrote a blog post that digs into this exact issue — including a very recent, real-life example of what happens when a mailbox provider has an outage, but critical infrastructure upgrades have been delayed by two out of three ESPs. “It’s one small change. How big of a deal can it make, really?” You tell me. Here are the Delivered Rates across 3 ESPs during a recent outage at a mailbox provider: SocketLabs: 99.25% Competitor 1: 80.06% Competitor 2: 55.49% These numbers aren't just anomalies. Brian's blog digs into the nitty-gritty of it all — including what happened, why, and what it actually takes to fix it. More specifically (for you technical nerds), he covers: 🔎 The impact of neglecting infrastructure configuration. MTA misconfigurations can lead to significant delays and unnecessary bounces, which have an impact on your sender reputation and the overall email performance for your senders. 🔎 The importance of proper bounce handling to keep up with mailbox provider updates. Brian makes it clear why these "minor" changes can have major consequences if you're not regularly checking for errors and taking action on performance issues. 🔎 The risks of outdated TLS protocols. You might be surprised at the deliverability hits you're taking if you still rely on older versions. Ultimately, sending email is easy. But reaching the inbox hard — if your email provider isn’t keeping pace with what’s happening in the industry (such as when a mailbox provider has an outage). If you’re responsible for making sure emails actually reach the inbox, this one’s a must-read. 💌 Check it out here: https://lnkd.in/g88DJNXZ PS - 🍀🍀 Here's a dash of green because, well, who couldn't use some good luck in 2025? Go n-éirí an bóthar leat.🍀🍀🍀 💌 🌈💰🍀

Microsoft’s recent 19-hour Outlook outage left millions without email access across web, desktop, and mobile. This matters because when core services go down for so long, it disrupts work, slows decision-making, and can cost businesses serious money. Knowing about this incident helps IT teams plan better backups and prepare for similar failures in their own environments. The outage began with a configuration change that overwhelmed key infrastructure, according to Microsoft’s status updates. Experts point to mishaps in authentication (Entra ID), software updates, DNS routing, or Azure Traffic Manager as likely triggers. It wasn’t an isolated slip—Outlook and Teams have tangled with outages in May and again in June, and other cloud giants like Google and IBM have faced similar multi-hour blackouts. As systems grow more complex, a single glitch can ripple out and affect multiple services at once. For companies in finance, healthcare, and emergency services, these breakdowns are especially risky. Missed emails can breach compliance, break service-level agreements, and damage customer trust. Analysts recommend building stronger redundancy, running proactive automated checks, and using AI to spot trouble before it hits. Automated rollback plans and tighter configuration controls can shorten outages, keeping critical communication tools online. #CloudInfrastructure #MicrosoftOutlook #TechReliability #ChangeYourPassword Follow me for regular updates on cloud reliability and best practices.

Your Email Provider Determines Your Cold Outreach Ceiling—Here’s What You Need to Know: When it comes to cold email, deliverability isn’t just about copy or targeting—it starts with the infrastructure you’re sending from. And whether you realize it or not, your choice of email provider plays a massive role in whether your messages even have a shot at the inbox. Here’s the backdrop: Google and Microsoft dominate the business email market, controlling the vast majority of inboxes. That dominance doesn’t just affect users—it shapes the rules of deliverability. Both companies appear to prioritize their internal networks, meaning you're more likely to inbox when sending from a Google or Microsoft domain to their own ecosystems. That’s important, especially when you’re evaluating the three main options for cold outbound: 1. Google Workspace Google offers some of the best deliverability out of the box. Their sender reputation is solid, their systems are a bit more forgiving, and they’re generally more permissive when it comes to cold email—at least in practice (even if the terms of service say otherwise). The real downside? Cost. At scale, paying per user gets expensive, fast. 2. Microsoft 365 Microsoft’s platform looks great on paper—competitive pricing, enterprise-grade systems, wide adoption. But in real-life cold email, it tends to underperform on deliverability. The issue isn’t sending limits—it’s the filters. Microsoft’s spam protections are simply much more aggressive than Google’s, which makes inboxing a challenge even with the right warm-up and infrastructure. 3. SMTP-Only Providers SMTP platforms are often appealing because of the sheer scale they offer—you can spin up tons of inboxes at a fraction of the cost. The trade-off? You’re sacrificing deliverability. These IPs don’t carry the same reputation weight, and you’ll need more technical oversight to maintain sender health. But if volume is your strategy and cost-efficiency matters, it’s still a viable route—as long as you know what you're getting into. So what’s the best choice? There isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer. It all comes down to your goals, volume, and tolerance for risk and complexity. Most outbound teams end up testing different setups to find what actually works for their ICP and sending patterns. If you want to skip the tech headaches and easily spin up and test Google, Microsoft, and SMTP inboxes in real-world cold campaigns, we built ScaledMail to make this dead simple. We handle setup, admin, and ongoing support—so you can focus on results, not routing headaches. Curious how it works? Let’s talk.

Most SDR teams are trapped in this cycle and don't even know it... I've seen this exact cycle destroy good people's careers when the fix was always infrastructure and process, not talent. Here's how it works... Stage 1: Send from main domain  "We'll just be careful with volume" they say. Thousands of emails from yourcompany[DOT]com because "it builds trust." Stage 2: Deliverability tanks, Open rates look decent at 70%.  Reply rates? 0.5% if you're lucky.  Everything's landing in spam, but the dashboard looks fine. Stage 3: Blame the symptoms "Our copy must suck." "We need better targeting." "Let's try a new subject line approach." Stage 4: Fire the SDR leader "Not enough pipeline generated." New hire comes in, same infrastructure, same problems. Stage 5: Fire the VP of Sales, Few months later, still no meaningful improvement. "We need fresh blood and new strategies." Stage 6: Fire the CRO, Year later, business is missing revenue targets. "Time for a complete sales overhaul." Stage 7: Repeat the cycle - New leadership, same broken infrastructure. The real problem never gets addressed. Meanwhile, your main domain is torched. Missing investor intros, customer referrals, partnership emails - hundreds of thousands in opportunity cost. A Better Way: → Domain diversification (1/3 SMTP, 1/3 Microsoft, 1/3 Google) → Infrastructure first, messaging second → Test deliverability before scaling volume → Constant monitoring and adjustment Your reply rates aren't low because of bad copy. They're low because nobody's seeing your emails. #sdr #sales #deliverability #leadership ps - if your SDR team is getting under 3% reply rates but you think it's a messaging problem, we should probably chat.

Landing in the inbox is as hard as explaining to your parents what you actually do for work. After looking at over 1,000,000 sent emails, we figured out what's working (as of today). 1. Infrastructure → The Foundation No shortcuts here. You need: → Proper authentication (MFA, oAuth) → Clean IP reputation (dedicated IPs, no shared pools) → Multiple domains for scale → Domain silos (separate workspaces) → Automated alerts for issues 2. Content Strategy → The Execution This is where most mess up: → Human-written copy (AI assists, never leads) → Consistent sending patterns → Lightning-fast reply times → Precise targeting (right person, right message) → Testing 3-5 verticals simultaneously 3. Monitoring → The Protection Your early warning system: → Daily deliverability checks → Spam trap monitoring → Engagement tracking → Domain health scoring → Performance alerts The truth about deliverability in 2025? It's not only about avoiding spam filters. It's about building infrastructure that lasts. Tech changes. Algorithms update. But solid infrastructure always wins. The companies hitting 95% inbox rates? They're not smarter. They're just more systematic.