Newsletters and Deliverability: Here’s What I Learned (and What Creators Need to Do)

How to stay out of the spam folder…

Karen Cherry
4 min readMay 26, 2024

Hi! Today I want to talk about email “deliverability”, because things have changed in the past few months, and it’s impacting newsletter creators.

This article is targetted to creators who use Substack, but the advice herein also applies to users of Beehiv and GhostPro.

TLDR (too long didn’t read): Email inbox systems are now demanding extra authenticity from email senders. There’s IT stuff in the background that flags emails as ‘genuine’ or junk and more emails are being checked more often. Substack looks after the IT stuff for us (yay) but we’d be idiots if we didn’t also take action to give our emails the best chance possible. There are four things to do that will help set your publication up for the future.

Deliverability is changing

This post was inspired by my frustration, as I spent ANOTHER chunk of time I didn’t want to spend wading around in my junk/spam folders. This week I fished out even more genuine emails than last week….

Buried amongst my usual junk folder sludge of messages from HelloFresh Affiliate, NationalDebtRelief, LeafFilter Partner and LumeDeodorant.com Associate, I found 12…

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Karen Cherry

Substack writer. Secret tree hugger. Aussie business owner with >$20K revenue on Substack. Refusing to dumb it down.