Most delivery problems in 2025 will not be about servers or IPs but data issues. You know, reputation issues that are caused by not getting permission before sending, not honoring unsubscribe requests quickly enough, or continuing to mail that address that has consistently bounced for the last six months. A surprising number of those happen because the ESP’s and the marketer’s systems don’t talk to each other properly, particularly about critical data like unsubscribes and bounces. When your ESP says an address is suppressed, but your CRM sends to it anyway, you don’t have an infrastructure issue – you have a coordination crisis.
The Source of Truth Problem
Every email program needs one definitive source of truth for critical sending data. That means things like “who has subscribed,” “who is on what list segment,” “who has unsubscribed,” and “which addresses are bouncing.” This source might be your ESP, a dedicated suppression management system, or your CRM – but whatever it is, it must be authoritative across your entire email ecosystem.
For organizations using multiple ESPs, this becomes even more critical. An unsubscribe that happens on ESP A must propagate to ESP B, your marketing automation platform, and any other sending systems. The same goes for bounce data, complaint information, and other suppression records. Email marketing laws like the CAN-SPAM Act don’t care which system received an unsubscribe request – they only care that you honor it across all your systems. “But they only unsubscribed from our newsletter ESP, not our sales ESP” isn’t a defense that will hold up.
System Coordination Matters
That doesn’t mean that success with ESP infrastructure is about complex technical configurations. It’s really more about ensuring every system in your email ecosystem respects the same source of truth and that the source of truth gets relevant information from all of the ecosystem’s parts. This means your CRM, marketing automation platform, transactional systems, and any other sending platforms need to check the current suppression status of addresses before every send – not just occasionally or when they remember.
Making Systems Play Nice
Whether using a single ESP or multiple sending platforms, you need a clear data flow for suppression information. This means understanding how unsubscribe requests, bounce data, and complaint information move between systems. Most importantly, you must ensure every platform checks the authoritative source before sending and respects what it finds.
When any system in your email ecosystem ignores suppression data, it’s not just being uncooperative – it’s actively damaging your sending reputation. Each message sent to a known bad address or previously unsubscribed recipient isn’t just a waste of resources – it’s a step toward deliverability problems that can take months to fix.
Monitoring What Matters
Your sending platforms generate constant streams of suppression data: unsubscribes, bounces, complaints, and other feedback. However, this information only helps if it’s appropriately aggregated and distributed throughout the rest of the system. Effective oversight means ensuring data flows correctly and every system checks things before sending.
You need to know both whether messages are being delivered and whether they should have been sent at all. Is suppression data propagating correctly between systems? Are all platforms checking things before sending? Are unsubscribe requests being honored immediately across your entire email ecosystem? These coordination points often reveal problems before they become crises.
Scaling Safely
One of the main benefits of professional email infrastructure is virtually unlimited scaling capacity. But scaling safely means ensuring every system in your email ecosystem can handle increased volume while maintaining proper coordination. Your ESP can scale, but can your integration points keep up?
As organizations scale their email programs, coordination problems often become more apparent. A system occasionally forgetting to check suppression status becomes a significant liability at higher volumes. Understanding how to maintain proper system coordination at scale prevents these issues from limiting your program’s growth.
Making It Work
Start by identifying your authoritative source of truth and mapping how suppression data flows through your email ecosystem. Understanding how each platform shares and receives critical data reveals potential failure points. Pay particular attention to unsubscribe processing and bounce suppression handling across system boundaries – these critical processes often hold opportunities for improvement.
Organizations struggling with coordination issues should focus on establishing clear data authority. Whether using a dedicated suppression management system, your CRM, or one of your ESPs as the source of truth, create processes ensuring every system checks for correct and current information before sending. Implement monitoring that confirms suppression data is propagating correctly throughout your ecosystem. Build proper coordination into your systems before volume increases make problems worse.
Success in 2025 won’t come from complex technical configurations. It will come from ensuring every system in your email ecosystem participates in a coordinated data flow with a clear source of truth about who should receive mail. The key is understanding how to maintain proper coordination rather than letting systems operate independently.
This article is part of our Email Trust Bundle service offering. For detailed implementation guidance or system coordination review services, contact Whizardries for expert assistance.
