Will a DNS outage impact email deliverability if sends are paused and then resumed?
Summary
What email marketers say10Marketer opinions
Email marketer from SendGrid advises monitoring engagement metrics (opens, clicks) closely after resuming sends. Low engagement can signal deliverability problems and impact future sending reputation.
Email marketer from Mailchimp suggests gradually increasing sending volume after any interruption. This helps re-establish your sending reputation with ISPs and prevent deliverability issues.
Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog suggests monitoring key metrics like bounce rate and open rate after resuming sends. A sudden spike could indicate deliverability issues related to the outage.
Email marketer from Reddit shares that some delays might occur as systems recover, but major deliverability impacts are unlikely if the outage was short and DNS records recover normally.
Email marketer from Campaign Monitor suggests segmenting your audience and gradually increasing send volume to smaller segments first, monitoring performance before sending to your entire list.
Email marketer from Litmus recommends checking inbox placement after resuming. Use seed lists to see if emails are landing in the inbox, spam folder, or being blocked.
Email marketer from Stack Overflow explains that most sending systems queue emails during temporary outages. Resending immediately could cause duplicates if the queue retries deliveries.
Email marketer from Gmass recommends performing a deliverability test with a tool like Mail-Tester after resuming sending to assess potential impact on inbox placement.
Email marketer from Email on Acid advises monitoring your sender reputation after resuming sends, as a sudden increase in sending volume post-outage might trigger spam filters.
Email marketer from Hubspot explains that to rebuild your sender reputation you should aim to keep sending volumes consistent. When there is a long pause it can impact your sending reputation and you will need to warm up your IP addresses again
What the experts say5Expert opinions
Expert from Email Geeks says that five minute TTLs aren’t uncommon so unless ESPs are hanging on to records longer than they should they’ll see delayed deliveries.
Expert from Email Geeks expects some metrics to spike temporarily, but nothing normal delivery logic can’t handle.
Expert from Email Geeks explains that a DNS outage shouldn’t have any impact on deliverability or mail sending, as ESPs should run a recursive resolver locally that caches DNS records for places they send regularly.
Expert from Word to the Wise emphasizes that a DNS outage can indirectly affect sender reputation if it leads to increased complaints or bounces due to delivery failures during the outage recovery period. They suggest closely watching feedback loops.
Expert from SpamResource highlights the potential for temporary bounces and deferrals if DNS records are still propagating after the outage. They recommend monitoring bounce logs for increased errors.
What the documentation says5Technical articles
Documentation from RFC Editor explains that DNS resolvers implement retry mechanisms to handle temporary failures. Therefore, messages might be delayed, not necessarily dropped, during a brief outage.
Documentation from AWS Route 53 states that DNS records have a Time-To-Live (TTL), which determines how long resolvers cache the information. Shorter TTLs mean faster updates after an outage.
Documentation from Google Workspace Admin Help explains that DNS changes can take up to 48 hours to propagate fully. Resuming sends immediately after an outage might hit resolvers that haven't updated yet, causing temporary delivery failures.
Documentation from ICANN explains that root servers are geographically distributed and highly redundant. Outages affecting a single root server are unlikely to cause widespread email delivery failures but regional issues can occur.
Documentation from IETF details that if DNSSEC is enabled, a DNS outage can have a more significant impact as validation failures can cause delivery problems until the DNS records are properly updated and validated.