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- đź“© The Day I Watched a Publisher Lose a Third of His List in One Night
đź“© The Day I Watched a Publisher Lose a Third of His List in One Night
Without Any Clue Why
Captain YAR
November 14, 2025
A few months back, a publisher friend called me in a panic.
“Something’s wrong. Our email just stopped working.”
Eighteen months of steady sending. Healthy engagement. Then, overnight, the numbers fell through the floor.
Open rate: 45 percent to 11 percent. One day to the next.
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He blamed the content at first. Of course he did. Maybe the subject line missed. Maybe the format went stale. He even wondered if he should pivot the whole editorial plan.
I asked one question: “Did you check Spamhaus?”
Silence.
“What’s Spamhaus?”
That’s when it clicked. Most operators never see the plumbing. They think deliverability lives in copy tweaks and send times. Underneath your ESP sits an infrastructure layer that can erase your reach before a human ever sees your words.
In his case, the sending IP hit a blocklist, likely after a list bombing run he didn’t notice. Roughly 80 percent of sends were rejected at the server. No inbox, no opens, no chance.
This wasn’t a content problem. It was an infrastructure problem. And he had no map.
Why I brought LB Blair on the pod
I wanted someone who treats email like a crime scene. Enter LB Blair, a full-stack email solutions architect with a background in computer forensics and IT audit. She works on the stuff most people never check: blocklists, authentication, HTML construction, IP reputation, and the quiet failure modes inside ESPs.
She has tuned big newsletters and large ecommerce programs. She has saved companies real money by fixing what does not show up in a copy review.
I asked the questions operators actually have but rarely phrase well:
What do you check first when deliverability craters in a day
Shared IPs or dedicated, and when to switch
Whether DMARC is optional or enforced
Why images can sink inbox placement
How to defend against list bombing
What followed felt like a field guide to forensic deliverability.
1) Your images are too heavy
Content filtering is back, only the rules moved. It is less about “spam words” and more about construction. Think bloated drag-and-drop HTML, oversized images pulled straight from your CMS, and mixed or insecure links.
LB’s rule: compress everything before upload. TinyPNG or a similar tool can shave 50 to 80 percent off file size without visible loss. One of her clients had 4 MB images in every send. Compression alone lifted inbox placement by double digits in two weeks. Cost: zero. Effort: about two minutes per image.
2) List bombing poisons reputation quietly
An open web form gets flooded with fake or stolen addresses. Your autoresponder fires. Bounces and complaints pile up. Reputation sinks.
Baseline defenses I use: reCAPTCHA v3 or hCaptcha, a hidden field to trap bots, validate addresses before they hit your ESP, and turn on Bot Fight Mode in Cloudflare. LB’s framing stuck with me, “Use defense in depth. Belt, suspenders, and a backup plan.”
3) You treat DMARC like a suggestion
Plenty of teams set SPF and DKIM, then leave DMARC half finished. LB’s sequence: start at p=none for about 45 days to collect reports, fix what is failing, then go straight to reject once clean. Skip quarantine unless you are under active abuse.
She told me about a team that jumped to reject without testing. Their marketing sends bounced, then finance mail from NetSuite bounced. Collections stalled because invoices never landed. Test first, then enforce. Once you are clean, DMARC at reject hardens you against spoofing and unlocks BIMI. LB has seen BIMI add a noticeable lift in opens, often around the low teens.
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5) If deliverability collapses overnight, check these first
LB’s first pass looks like this:
Blocklists, with Spamhaus at the top
Domain and IP reputation signals, plus Google Safe Browsing
Construction issues, for example broken links, insecure http links, malware flags, heavy images
If it fell off a cliff in a day, something changed in a day. Events, not vibes.
6) One-click unsubscribe really is enforced
Google began pushing hard on this in late 2024. LB has seen senders punished for broken implementations, sometimes due to an ESP quirk rather than the sender. If your one-click is not instant and universal, fix it. She found a client whose one-click did nothing because an http post failed. Postmaster flags followed. Recovery took months. The fix took twenty minutes.
7) You are overpaying for infrastructure
Audit your contracts and your incidents. Lock in annual terms only when volume supports it. Track outages and delays, then request credits. Negotiate with your reputation metrics in hand. If you lift platform reputation, say so. You are a sender they want to keep.
8) Planning to sell, audit deliverability early
Before a sale, measure real inbox reach by ISP, unique monthly reach from engaged users, lead source quality and risk, and unsubscribe compliance. Email is not a minor line item in diligence anymore. Email is diligence. LB supported the Milk Road audit to smoke out hidden landmines that could drag valuation.
What this means for operators
Most teams try to solve deliverability with copy and timing. That is the wrong layer.
Start with infrastructure. Authentication. Image weight. Bot defense. IP strategy. Contract discipline.
Because when your open rate falls from 45 percent to 11 percent in a night, you do not need another subject line brainstorm. You need a checklist, a cool head, and someone who has seen this movie enough times to know where the wires cross.
If that day ever comes, start with Spamhaus. Then work down the list.
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