Email
Transactional Email
Password resets, receipts, notifications, magic links, order updates. Latency-sensitive, reputation-sensitive, and often mission-critical. Delivered on isolated streams with tight SLAs.
Overview
Transactional email is not marketing email running through a different endpoint. It has different latency requirements, different reputation dynamics, and different failure modes. A delayed magic link is worse than a delayed newsletter.
Northbound operates transactional streams on dedicated IP pools separate from marketing, with tighter throttling, faster retry, and stricter monitoring. Complaint rates should be near-zero; delivery times should be sub-minute at the median.
Benefits
- Isolated IP pool from marketing traffic
- Sub-minute median delivery for the major providers
- Higher-touch monitoring and alerting
Technical specifications
| Median delivery | < 30s at Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo |
|---|---|
| Target complaint rate | < 0.02% |
| Isolation | Separate IP pool, separate DKIM selector, separate DMARC policy |
Use cases
- — SaaS notifications, e-commerce order flows, financial confirmations, healthcare communications.
Questions
Should transactional and marketing share a domain?
Ideally not. Different subdomains at minimum. Complaint rates on marketing should not affect the reputation of your password-reset stream.
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