HELP MY NEWSLETTER
Emergency intervention for underperforming newsletters.
Deliverability
Inbox Trust
Survival
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State of the Inbox
Someone moved into your subscribers' inboxes. They didn't ask. And they're reading your emails first.
For years, the inbox was neutral territory. You sent. It arrived. Your reader decided. That model is gone.
In the last 90 days, every major inbox provider rewrote the rules and most newsletter publishers have no idea.
Gmail now rejects non-compliant mail before it ever touches a server.
An AI reads and summarizes your emails before your subscriber does.
Your open rate is lying to you.
And the one thing consistently making it through? Human voice. Actual relevance. A real point of view.
This edition covers: Gmail's new SMTP lockout, the Gemini AI that reads your email first, what your open rate actually means now, and the one thing inbox providers keep letting through.
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Part 1
The locked door: Gmail stopped being polite in November
For almost two years, Gmail treated authentication requirements as suggestions. If your SPF, DKIM, or DMARC were misconfigured, your email might land in spam, but it would still technically land.
That grace period ended in November 2025.
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Gmail now rejects non-compliant messages at the SMTP protocol level. Not spam folder. Not promotions tab.
Full rejection. Permanent failure codes. The email never existed.
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This is the most consequential shift in email delivery since Gmail introduced tabs in 2013.
The difference is that tabs were visible. This one is invisible. Newsletters are bouncing and creators are blaming their subject lines.
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The three things Gmail now requires at minimum:
SPF proves your sending server is authorized to send on behalf of your domain.
DKIM is a cryptographic signature that proves the email wasn't tampered with in transit.
DMARC tells Gmail what to do when the above checks fail. Without it, you have no policy. Gmail makes one for you. You won't like it.
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The good news: if you're on beehiiv and have set up a custom sending domain, most of this is handled for you. The bad news: "most" is not "all." DMARC in particular still trips people up. beehiiv has a wizard for it, but you have to go find it.
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The fastest check: send yourself an email and click the three-dot menu in Gmail. Hit "Show original." If you see PASS next to SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, you're clear. If you see FAIL or nothing at all, you have a problem that predates your subject lines.
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Yahoo and Microsoft followed Google's lead. Outlook sits at a 75.6% inbox placement rate versus Gmail's 87.2%. If your list skews corporate, you have a whole separate problem worth diagnosing.
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Quick win worth knowing: BIMI
BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) lets verified senders display their logo directly in the inbox next to the sender name. Studies show it increases opens by 38% and brand recall by over 100%. It requires a valid DMARC record to implement, which is a nice extra reason to get that DMARC sorted today.
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Part 2
The invisible reader: Gmail's AI gets to your email before your subscriber does
In early 2026, Google integrated its Gemini AI throughout Gmail. This wasn't a UI update.
Gmail now automatically summarizes your email, prioritizes or deprioritizes it, and surfaces a snippet before your reader makes a single decision.
Deliverability is no longer binary. Gmail now creates a gradient of visibility inside the inbox itself. An email can technically land in the inbox and still be effectively invisible if the AI decides it isn't worth surfacing. Analysis of billions of emails shows up to 40% of messages that technically reach Gmail inboxes are being deprioritized this way.
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What Gemini changed about your metrics:
Open rates are up. Gmail auto-opens emails to generate summaries. You're getting credit for opens that never happened as human decisions.
Click rates are down. If the AI summary answers the reader's question, they never need to open the full email. Click-through rates have already dropped measurably since the rollout.
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This is already showing up in data. If your opens look fine but your clicks are quietly sliding, you're not looking at a subject line problem or a content quality problem. You're looking at a summary problem.
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How to write for the AI reader:
Front-load your main point in the first 100 to 200 characters. The AI builds its summary from that window. If your opening is a pleasantry or a weather metaphor, the summary will be useless and your email will be deprioritized.
Before (Gemini-unfriendly):
"Hey friend! Hope your week is off to a great start. There's so much happening in the world of email right now, and I wanted to share a few thoughts that have been on my mind..."
After (Gemini-proof):
"Gmail now rejects non-authenticated email at the server level. If you haven't checked your DMARC record in the last 30 days, your newsletter may already be disappearing without a trace."
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Gmail also added a "Manage subscriptions" menu that shows readers exactly how often you email them, with one-click opt-outs. High frequency, low relevance senders are about to get pruned at a rate we haven't seen before.
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Quick gut check
Which of these is quietly killing your deliverability right now?
Tap your answer. Next issue: I dig into the top vote.
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No context needed. Your click is the data.
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Part 3
Relevance is the new deliverability — and one thing keeps clearing the filter
Inbox providers are no longer just asking "is this spam?" They're asking "does this deserve to exist in this person's inbox?"
That is a completely different question with a completely different answer.
What consistently passes the new test is not better subject lines, shorter emails, or cleaner templates. It is genuine human voice with a specific point of view. Research confirms what deliverability experts have been saying for two years: emails sent from a real person — a founder, an expert, someone with opinions — consistently outperform brand-sent messages on opens, clicks, and conversions.
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What the AI gatekeepers reward:
Concrete information in the first sentence. Not a hook. Not a question. A statement that tells the reader exactly what they're about to get.
Engagement that looks like a conversation, not a broadcast. Replies. Real clicks. Forwards. These are what train Gmail to treat your domain as a trusted sender, not just another newsletter platform.
Zero-party data done honestly. A preferences survey at signup, a poll in the email, a reply ask. Readers who shape their own experience don't just engage more. They defend your sender reputation by not ignoring you.
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The uncomfortable implication: if an AI summary of your newsletter is just as useful as the actual newsletter, you don't have a deliverability problem. You have a content problem that deliverability is exposing.
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The publishers winning in the new inbox are not the ones with the cleanest templates or the most aggressive send schedules. They're the ones whose messages people actually want to receive. That distinction has never been more visible to the machines making the calls.
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TOOL DROP
The 5-Minute Newsletter Health Audit
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If any of Part 1 through 3 made you feel a little ill, good. That means your diagnostic instincts are working.
This free audit walks you through the same triage checklist I run on sick newsletters before I touch anything else.
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20 questions across five categories:
Authentication status. Engagement health. Content strategy. Monetization. List hygiene. You'll get a score from 0 to 100 and a grade that tells you whether you're in good shape or critical condition. No signup required to see your results.
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Participation challenge: run the audit and reply with your score. I'll tell you whether it's a slow bleed or a severed artery and what to fix first.
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Authenticated. Relevant. Human. That's the new checklist.
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Part 4
The actual checklist: what to do this week before you write one more issue
None of this requires a complete rebuild. It requires about 90 minutes of actual work and the willingness to look at a few numbers you've been avoiding.
Here is the order of operations.
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Step 1: Verify authentication (15 minutes)
Send yourself a test email. Open it in Gmail. View the original headers. All three — SPF, DKIM, DMARC — need to say PASS. If anything fails, this is your only job until it's fixed. Nothing else matters while your authentication is broken.
Step 2: Pull your click-to-open ratio (10 minutes)
Not just your open rate. Your CTOR, which is clicks divided by opens. If your opens are up but CTOR is down, you have a Gemini problem, not a subject line problem. A healthy CTOR typically sits between 10 and 20%. Below 5% is a red flag that your content isn't compelling enough to survive the summary layer.
Step 3: Rewrite your next opening paragraph (20 minutes)
Take the first two or three sentences of your last issue and ask: if an AI only read this, would it generate a summary that makes my reader want to click? If the answer is no, rewrite until the answer is yes. Front-load the main point. Cut the warmup. Your pleasantries are costing you real engagement.
Step 4: Suppress your disengaged subscribers (30 minutes)
Anyone who hasn't opened in 90-plus days is hurting your reputation more than they're helping your vanity metrics. On beehiiv, you can filter by engagement and suppress without deleting, so you're not burning the relationship, you're just stopping the bleeding. Run this segment now. Set a re-engagement sequence. Stop emailing ghosts.
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The inbox used to be where your subscribers made their decisions about you.
Now an algorithm makes the first decision, and your reader inherits whatever it decided.
The newsletters that survive this era are the ones that make the algorithm's job easy — because the content is so clearly relevant, so obviously from a real person, that the AI doesn't have to think twice.
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The deliverability problem is real. The content problem underneath it is older. Fix both.
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I've been in email long enough to remember when deliverability was a simple checklist you ran once and forgot about. Those days are gone. What's happening right now in the inbox is the most significant structural shift I've seen in 20 years of doing this, and most of the people it's affecting have no idea it's underway.
That's why I wrote this edition. Not to scare you. To give you the 90 minutes of work that will tell you exactly where you stand and what needs to happen next.
Run the audit. Check those headers. Reply and tell me your worst number. I read every reply.
Talk soon,
Jenn
Help My Newsletter // Opt-In Architects
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