Deliverability

Deliverability is whether your email reaches the inbox. It’s mostly determined by things outside Karani, so it’s worth knowing what those are.

What decides it

Authentication. Receiving servers check that mail claiming to come from your domain is authorised to. That’s SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — DNS records on your domain. Without them, a lot of mail goes straight to spam. Whoever manages your organisation’s domain sets these up.

Sending reputation. Built up over time from how recipients treat your mail. Marking as spam hurts; opening and replying helps.

List quality. Sending to dead addresses is one of the strongest negative signals there is. Every bounce counts against you.

Content. Matters less than people think, but all-image emails, link shorteners, and aggressive subject lines don’t help.

What helps, in order

The short version

1. Get SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up on your sending domain.
2. Remove addresses that bounce, at the source.
3. Send bulk mail through Mailchimp, not by pasting addresses into your own client.
4. Only send to people who expect to hear from you.

Bounces

A hard bounce means the address doesn’t exist. Remove or fix it on the contact — not just in Mailchimp, or the next sync will put it straight back.

A soft bounce is temporary — a full mailbox, a server hiccup. Watch it; a persistent soft bounce is effectively a hard one.

Karani doesn’t automatically mark addresses as bad when they bounce, so this is a manual habit. Once a quarter is enough.

Why bulk-pasting addresses is a bad idea

Exporting a list and pasting it into your own mail client means:

• No unsubscribe link, which many jurisdictions require
• No bounce processing, so bad addresses stay on the list forever
• No reputation management
• A high chance your personal address gets rate-limited or flagged

Fine for five people. Not for two hundred.

If your mail is going to spam

1. Check authentication first. Send a message to a test account and look at the raw headers for SPF and DKIM results. This is the cause more often than everything else combined.
2. Check the list. How many of those addresses are years old?
3. Ask a recipient to check their spam folder and mark it “not spam”. Direct engagement is a strong positive signal.
4. Check whether your domain is on a blocklist.

What Karani controls

Karani sends transactional and one-to-one email — receipts, portal invitations, individual messages — through its own infrastructure, which is monitored and authenticated.

What Karani can’t control is your own domain’s DNS records, or the reputation of a list you built somewhere else.

Donors reporting they never got a receipt

Check the address on the contact first — a typo is the most common cause by a wide margin. Then have them check spam. Then look at authentication.