By Eric Jenkins, Chief Operating Officer at InboxAlly.
Eric Jenkins is Chief Operating Officer at InboxAlly, an email deliverability platform that measures inbox placement, monitors blocklists and sender reputation, and verifies email lists. In this email interview with MarTech Edition, he explains why shared domain reputation is the hardest part of enterprise email, how AI summaries in Gmail and Apple Mail change what happens after delivery, and why he thinks inbox placement belongs next to revenue in the weekly review.
What do large organizations need most from their email programs today?
They need predictability. A large company may send from a dozen brands, several ESPs and many domains. Its revenue plans assume that mail reaches the inbox. When placement slips at one provider, the loss is real, but standard reports rarely show it.
So the first need is visibility. Teams need one view of inbox placement by provider, brand and stream, with alerts when something shifts. The second is ownership. Each sending stream needs an owner and clear rules for authentication, volume and list sources. The third is trust. Security and legal teams now review every tool that touches subscriber data. Each one has to pass the same review as the company’s other vendors.
What makes deliverability especially challenging at enterprise scale?
The biggest challenge is shared reputation. Many teams send from the same domain or its subdomains, and mailbox providers connect them. One team that mails an old list can hurt the reputation every other team relies on.
Volume is the second challenge. Providers limit how fast they accept mail from any one sender. A holiday promotion that doubles volume overnight can trigger delays and spam filtering, even with a clean list. Large senders have to ramp up gradually and spread big sends out.
The third is visibility. At 100 million messages a month, a two-point drop in inbox placement means two million emails in spam. The ESP still reports them as delivered. Without placement data by provider and stream, teams often learn about a problem from the revenue report.
How can brands balance email performance with security and data governance?
Security and performance mostly ask for the same things. SPF, DKIM and DMARC protect a brand from spoofing. Gmail and Yahoo have required them from bulk senders since 2024, and Microsoft since 2025. A domain with DMARC at enforcement is harder to impersonate and easier for providers to trust.
The harder balance is data. Deliverability tools, list verification and analytics all want subscriber data, and each new vendor adds risk. Share the least data that does the job. Ask each vendor where your data is stored, how long it’s kept, who can see it and whether it trains AI models. Ask for an independent audit and a data processing agreement.
Good governance helps performance too. Set clear rules for where addresses come from and when inactive ones are removed. Those rules protect reputation as well as privacy. The data minimization that GDPR asks for keeps lists clean.
How is AI changing the way inboxes evaluate and prioritize email?
Mailbox providers have used machine learning to filter spam for years. What’s new is AI deciding what happens inside the inbox. Gmail and Apple Mail now summarize messages. Apple Mail also sorts mail into categories and moves some messages to the top as a priority.
That adds a step between delivery and attention. A message can reach the inbox and still appear only as a one-line summary, or in a category the reader rarely opens.
Providers don’t publish how these features rank mail. Apple puts personal and time-sensitive messages first. Bulk mail that the reader ignores is the easiest to summarize or file away.
AI also reads the message itself. A summary has to understand what the email says. An email with one clear purpose is easier to summarize accurately than one that packs in five offers. Build each message around one main point.
What does the rise of AI-generated content mean for email deliverability?
Mostly, it means more email. When writing a message costs almost nothing, teams send more versions to more people more often. Volume without demand is what hurts reputation.
Mailbox providers don’t have to detect whether a person or a model wrote a message. They see how recipients respond. Generic copy that readers skip earns the same negative signal as any other unwanted mail.
AI also changes the threat side. Phishing written with AI no longer has the spelling mistakes that filters and readers used to catch. I expect providers to lean even more on who sent a message, through authentication, domain history and reputation. That raises the bar for legitimate senders too.
My advice is to use AI to make each message more relevant to the person who receives it. Don’t use it to send more mail to people who aren’t asking for it.
How are these changes shaping the way InboxAlly approaches product development?
They push us in three directions.
The first is measurement. Delivery alone tells a customer little. We report where mail lands at each provider, including which Gmail tab. We’re expanding coverage to more mailbox providers, starting with Apple iCloud.
The second is turning data into next steps. Customers want to know what changed and what to do about it. Our AI assistant reads a customer’s placement, reputation and blocklist data and explains it in plain language. It shows the data behind each answer, so a team can check its work.
The third is enterprise readiness. Enterprise buyers now review AI tools as closely as any other vendor. We support single sign-on. We’re preparing for our SOC 2 Type II audit, with the report expected in 2027. The assistant runs on Amazon Bedrock in our AWS account, and customer data doesn’t train it.
What is one common misconception enterprises have about email deliverability?
Many enterprises believe a strong brand protects their email. They assume mailbox providers recognize a famous name and give its mail the benefit of the doubt. Providers don’t work that way. Filters judge each sending domain and IP by its recent history and by how recipients respond. A household name that mails people who stopped engaging lands in spam like anyone else.
The fix is to treat deliverability as a business metric with an owner. Measure inbox placement by provider and stream, and review it alongside revenue.
What should email leaders be preparing for as the inbox continues to evolve?
Prepare for three changes.
First, opens will matter less. Apple Mail Privacy Protection already made open rates unreliable. AI summaries mean some readers will get the message without opening it. Measure inbox placement, clicks, conversions and replies instead.
Second, assistants will act for the reader. They’ll sort and summarize mail and suggest unsubscribing from senders the reader ignores. Watch for segments that stop engaging, and send them less before an assistant suggests they leave.
Third, the rules will keep tightening. Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft have all raised requirements for bulk senders since 2024. Expect DMARC enforcement and one-click unsubscribe to become the minimum everywhere. Teams that already measure placement and keep their lists engaged will have the least to change.
About InboxAlly
InboxAlly is an email deliverability platform that helps brands, agencies and email service providers reach the inbox and stay there. Since 2019, InboxAlly has measured inbox placement in live mailboxes at the major providers. The platform also monitors blocklists and sender reputation, verifies email lists and uses AI to turn that data into clear next steps. InboxAlly also helps senders restore placement when it drops. Hundreds of customers rely on InboxAlly, and it won the Sammy Award for Email Growth Catalyst in 2025 and 2026. Learn more at inboxally.com.
