Spammers are better at SPF, DKIM, and DMARC than everyone else

I am just having this problem. Actually getting SPF, DKIM and DMARC right and having a domain with a 0 spam score will still land you in the spam directory. It turns out, you need to have a "reputation"? before your email gets accepted into gmail. My head was spinning as to how that reputation will be built if your email just goes straight to spam.

But sure, Linkedin emails are definitively not spam and their dark-patterns at adding you at n+1 emailing list doesn't get them banned from the big (or any?) provider.

I worked on this for a while, at a time and in a market where most of our recipients had @hotmail addresses. I discovered that mass email sending was akin to a "pay-to-win" game.

We had/opted to acquire the services of a company "expert in email deliverability" (Return Path), who somehow provided detailed metrics of how our IPs were scored by MSFT. I always wondered why MSFT didn't provide those scores by themselves, and how a 3rd. party could have access to them.

Re. your comment... slow ramp-up is the only way, with constant monitoring of deliverability and consequent adjusting of recipients (i.e. removing those who do not open or hard-bounce). I did also wonder if paying that company perhaps gave us a headstart when adding new IPs...