Every major email service provider offers support. Most of it is good, especially for platform-specific questions. But there’s a hard limit to what ESP support can do, and most companies discover that limit at exactly the wrong moment – when their deliverability is failing and the ESP tells them “your configuration looks correct on our end.”
The difference between Deliverability Consulting and ESP support is the difference between platform-specific and system-level thinking.
ESP Support Is Platform-Specific
Your email service provider can tell you if your automation is set up correctly in their system. They can help you troubleshoot a bouncing email, explain why a scheduled campaign didn’t send, or walk you through their authentication setup. They can tell you if your complaint rate is within normal ranges according to their data.
What they can’t do is see outside their platform. They can’t tell you how your Mailgun sending interacts with your SendGrid transactional email. They can’t audit the reputation of your sending domain across all mailbox providers. They can’t tell you whether your volume curve is too aggressive relative to your domain’s history. They can’t assess how your cold outreach is affecting your marketing email reputation.
Most importantly, they can’t take full responsibility for your deliverability because their view is inherently limited. Their job is to keep their platform running reliably, not to make sure your mail lands in the inbox.
Deliverability Consulting Is System-Level
We look at your entire email ecosystem: all your sending infrastructure, all your sending channels, all your reputation streams, all your tools. We’re looking for interactions that aren’t visible from any single platform.
This matters because reputation and filtering don’t respect platform boundaries. If you’re sending high-volume cold outreach from your domain, that affects the reputation of every other email you send from that domain – including transactional email that’s critical to your business. If you have a complaint spike in one platform, that damages your sender reputation globally, not just in that ESP.
We also assess behavior patterns, language patterns, and volume timing in ways that no single ESP can. We look at what changed between when your deliverability was fine and when it wasn’t. We connect data points that most people don’t realize are connected.
Beyond Pass-Fail Diagnostics
When you call ESP support with a deliverability problem, you get a pass-fail answer: “Your configuration is correct” or “Your configuration has an error.” That’s helpful sometimes, but often it misses the real problem.
We’re trained to ask: configuration is correct, but is it right for your situation? Your complaint rate is low, but is it low relative to the volume increase you just did? Your engagement rate is normal, but normal for whom – for new cold prospects, or for warm list mail, or for transactional? The answers matter, and they require judgment that goes beyond what tools or single-platform support can provide.
Different Contexts, Same System
This matters across all email types. We work with cold email specialists, ecommerce platforms, SaaS companies sending mixed transactional and marketing mail, marketplaces, and lifecycle email operations. The diagnostic approach is the same in each case because the underlying system is the same: sender reputation, authentication, behavior patterns, mailbox provider filtering.
An ecommerce company might call ESP support because transactional email is being delayed, and the ESP says “your configuration is fine, it’s a network issue.” But we’d look at whether the transactional IP has been warmed properly, whether the sending volume is appropriate for the IP’s reputation, whether the complaint rate (even if low) is affecting trust with the mailbox provider.
A SaaS company might have great marketing deliverability but struggling cold outreach, and assume they need a new ESP or a new cold email tool. Often the problem is that they’re trying to send both from the same infrastructure without proper segmentation, so complaints from one stream damage the reputation of the other.
ESP support can’t see these problems because they’re literally outside their platform’s visibility. That’s where Deliverability Consulting fits.
When to Use Each
Use ESP support for platform-specific questions: how to set up their automation, how to use their features, troubleshooting platform-level issues. Use Deliverability Consulting when your mail is going to spam, when your deliverability is declining, when you’re scaling email volume and want to do it safely, or when you need someone to diagnose why multiple platforms or sending streams aren’t working together.
Most companies find they need both. The diagnostic session will clarify exactly which issues are platform-specific and which are system-level.
We’d love to learn more about your business, email deliverability and outreach goals, and see if we might be able to help.
Whether you have questions about what we do, how Protocol works, or you’d just like to pick our brains on some of our best practices, we’d be happy to chat.
Schedule a call with our Revenue Director, Chrisley Ceme.
Every major email service provider offers support. Most of it is good, especially for platform-specific questions. But there’s a hard limit to what ESP support can do, and most companies discover that limit at exactly the wrong moment – when their deliverability is failing and the ESP tells them “your configuration looks correct on our end.”
The difference between Deliverability Consulting and ESP support is the difference between platform-specific and system-level thinking.
ESP Support Is Platform-Specific
Your email service provider can tell you if your automation is set up correctly in their system. They can help you troubleshoot a bouncing email, explain why a scheduled campaign didn’t send, or walk you through their authentication setup. They can tell you if your complaint rate is within normal ranges according to their data.
What they can’t do is see outside their platform. They can’t tell you how your Mailgun sending interacts with your SendGrid transactional email. They can’t audit the reputation of your sending domain across all mailbox providers. They can’t tell you whether your volume curve is too aggressive relative to your domain’s history. They can’t assess how your cold outreach is affecting your marketing email reputation.
Most importantly, they can’t take full responsibility for your deliverability because their view is inherently limited. Their job is to keep their platform running reliably, not to make sure your mail lands in the inbox.
Deliverability Consulting Is System-Level
We look at your entire email ecosystem: all your sending infrastructure, all your sending channels, all your reputation streams, all your tools. We’re looking for interactions that aren’t visible from any single platform.
This matters because reputation and filtering don’t respect platform boundaries. If you’re sending high-volume cold outreach from your domain, that affects the reputation of every other email you send from that domain – including transactional email that’s critical to your business. If you have a complaint spike in one platform, that damages your sender reputation globally, not just in that ESP.
We also assess behavior patterns, language patterns, and volume timing in ways that no single ESP can. We look at what changed between when your deliverability was fine and when it wasn’t. We connect data points that most people don’t realize are connected.
Beyond Pass-Fail Diagnostics
When you call ESP support with a deliverability problem, you get a pass-fail answer: “Your configuration is correct” or “Your configuration has an error.” That’s helpful sometimes, but often it misses the real problem.
We’re trained to ask: configuration is correct, but is it right for your situation? Your complaint rate is low, but is it low relative to the volume increase you just did? Your engagement rate is normal, but normal for whom – for new cold prospects, or for warm list mail, or for transactional? The answers matter, and they require judgment that goes beyond what tools or single-platform support can provide.
Different Contexts, Same System
This matters across all email types. We work with cold email specialists, ecommerce platforms, SaaS companies sending mixed transactional and marketing mail, marketplaces, and lifecycle email operations. The diagnostic approach is the same in each case because the underlying system is the same: sender reputation, authentication, behavior patterns, mailbox provider filtering.
An ecommerce company might call ESP support because transactional email is being delayed, and the ESP says “your configuration is fine, it’s a network issue.” But we’d look at whether the transactional IP has been warmed properly, whether the sending volume is appropriate for the IP’s reputation, whether the complaint rate (even if low) is affecting trust with the mailbox provider.
A SaaS company might have great marketing deliverability but struggling cold outreach, and assume they need a new ESP or a new cold email tool. Often the problem is that they’re trying to send both from the same infrastructure without proper segmentation, so complaints from one stream damage the reputation of the other.
ESP support can’t see these problems because they’re literally outside their platform’s visibility. That’s where Deliverability Consulting fits.
When to Use Each
Use ESP support for platform-specific questions: how to set up their automation, how to use their features, troubleshooting platform-level issues. Use Deliverability Consulting when your mail is going to spam, when your deliverability is declining, when you’re scaling email volume and want to do it safely, or when you need someone to diagnose why multiple platforms or sending streams aren’t working together.
Most companies find they need both. The diagnostic session will clarify exactly which issues are platform-specific and which are system-level.
Our Revenue Director, Chrisley Ceme, is leading the Triggered Outbound program.Chrisley’s gone deep on this strategy and can walk you through:
- How Triggered Outbound fits with your outbound goals
- What triggers are available (and what’s possible within our platform)
- Pricing, onboarding, and getting started
