So last week, someone decided to start a Letterdrop account and send out thousands of emails with job postings to a scraped list of every employee at a company. The company employees were not very happy. Neither were we.

We spent the last few days taking a hard look at preventing spam and protecting your deliverability.

Email validation for all imports

If you import an email list through CSV or by adding them manually, we'll automatically validate them for you. We remove bounced, disposable, spam-trap, and deactivated emails that all harm your sending reputation. On average, 30% of emails you collect enter this state every year. If more than 10% of your emails are bad, then less than half are delivered from email clients since they think all your emails must be spam.

It costs us a bit to do this, but we're willing to bite the bullet even for our free customers to maintain high deliverability for everyone. Other providers like Substack only do this for select accounts and Mailchimp will straight up block you, but won't tell you which emails are problematic.

Manual reviews for suspicious accounts

We review new publications, the email lists they import, and the posts they want to publish to make sure that they're not spam. This means we weed out anyone who scraped a list and is sending out click-baity emails. These are likely to be marked as spam and hurt deliverability for everyone.

With human-verification (soon to be AI-assisted), we ensure that you're sending email alongside reputable folks who treat their audience with respect.

How can you improve your deliverability?

1. Set up a custom domain Email clients decide whether or not an email is spam based on the domain and IP. We take care of the IP stuff and are taking the above precautions to take care of @letterdrop domains. You can isolate yourself from other users by setting up your own domain. The best part of this is that you can ask your readers to white list your emails and add yourself to their contacts. This way, even if you move off Letterdrop, you will never go to spam.
2. Don't use scraped or bought lists If you didn't collect emails with permission, you're going to have a hard time getting them seen. There are tools dedicated to cold email for sales and outreach. Letterdrop is not one of them. We're focused on delivering email for writers and content marketers.
3. Turn on double opt-in Letterdrop has a setting that lets your readers confirm that they want to subscribe. As soon as they sign up, they get an email in their inbox asking for confirmation. They are only subscribed once they click on that button. This prevents people from signing up fake emails to your newsletter. I really pity the owners of john@gmail.com and test@gmail.com.