Signals
Field notes on email deliverability — what the hiring market, the inbox, and the shift to AI-mediated email reveal about where mail breaks and who's fixing it.
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Do regulated companies run email better? We measured 117 companies that were hiring for it.
Across a 117-company hiring scan, the 22 in regulated verticals had zero outbound authentication gaps 91% of the time against 55% for everyone else — and the gap survives controlling for size. They have already solved authentication; what they are hiring for is consent work nobody can audit from outside.
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We counted the Fortune 50's SPF lookups. Not one is over the limit, and half sidestepped it entirely.
Every SPF record is capped at 10 DNS lookups and crossing it fails authentication for every message. Of the 25 Fortune 50 domains we could count, none exceed it, median 4 — and the other 25 use a per-message macro, across five vendors, that no flattening tool can replicate.
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Are companies really going to hand DNS administration to marketers?
They already have. Across 117 job postings, email ownership lands on marketing under four different titles — so we audited all 117 sending domains and found 62% with zero outbound authentication gaps.
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We measured the Fortune 50's email cryptography. More than half publish a 1024-bit DKIM key.
A Cryptographic Bill of Materials for the Fortune 50's email, resolved from public DNS: DNSSEC 6 of 50, DANE 0, MTA-STS 2 — and 28 of 50 companies publish at least one 1024-bit DKIM key, below NIST's minimum since 2013.
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Is my DMARC record still valid under RFC 9989?
DMARC became a Standards Track spec in May 2026. We checked the Fortune 50: a third still carry a tag the new spec removed, none have adopted the ones that replaced it — and forged sender domains still feed $3.05B/yr in reported BEC losses.
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Your bounce rate isn't a sending problem. It's a list problem.
Read enough deliverability job postings and a pattern shows up: half of them aren't asking for help with SPF and DKIM. They're asking someone to clean up the list.
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Deliverability just got a director
A large receivables operation created a director-level role whose entire mandate is whether its email lands. When "does our mail arrive" becomes a director's job, deliverability has become a P&L function — not a config setting.
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A new platform doesn't inherit your good name
Fortune Media is moving off Salesforce Marketing Cloud; Poshmark is standing up a new engagement platform. Re-platform your stack and you reset the one asset that can't be migrated — sender reputation.
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Nobody emails you an error when your SPF breaks
A week of email-operations job postings keeps hiring the same role — a human alarm for silent SPF/DKIM/DMARC drift. It's a regression your CI can catch on its own.
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Your AI sequencer scaled the sending. It didn't scale the landing.
Read past the title: ApartmentIQ's new "Email Marketing Manager" is really hiring someone to keep an AI-sequencer outbound machine — 20 reps, Clay, Smartlead — out of spam.
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When email drives revenue, someone has to own whether it lands
Read past the job title and both postings are assigning the same thing: make the email that drives our revenue actually arrive.
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Replit's first lifecycle hire is a deliverability story
The job description quietly admits what most growth-stage companies won't: nobody owns whether the email actually arrives.