Driftmail review: deliverability held up, the pricing model did not
97.1% inbox placement across 12,000 real sends — and a billing model that charges you for people who never open anything.
- Published
- Last re-tested
- (17 days ago)
- Next review
- (in 3 months)
- Reading time
- 8 min
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Full disclosure policyI moved my own newsletter onto Driftmail for three months, which means the deliverability numbers here are from real sends to a real list, not a seed test. Inbox placement averaged 97.1% across 13 sends. The billing model charges on total contacts including unengaged ones, which cost me roughly $23/month for subscribers who had not opened anything in a year.
What works
- 97.1% average inbox placement across 13 real sends to 12,000+ contacts
- Migration from a previous ESP preserved subscriber timestamps and consent records
- Automation editor is genuinely visual and does not fall over on branching logic
- One-click full export including engagement history — no lock-in
What does not
- Billing counts unengaged contacts; no built-in sunset automation to remove them
- Template editor produces bloated HTML that clips in Gmail past ~102KB
- No SMS or push, so it is email-only in a market moving to multichannel
Buy it if
- Newsletter operators who care about deliverability more than channel breadth
- Anyone migrating off an ESP and worried about losing consent records
Skip it if
- Large lists with a big unengaged tail — the pricing punishes you for it
- Teams needing SMS or push in the same tool
How deliverability was measured
Every send in this test went to my own live list. Placement was measured with a 118-address seed panel across Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, Proton and two corporate Exchange tenants, run within five minutes of each send. Seed panels are imperfect and I would not present them as gospel — but they were run identically against my previous ESP for the six months before migration, which makes the comparison meaningful even if the absolute number is not.
Swipe the table sideways for the remaining columns
| Provider | Sends measured | Inbox | Promotions/Other | Spam |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Previous ESP (Jun–Oct 2025) | 22 | 91.4% | 6.8% | 1.8% |
| Driftmail (Nov 2025–Feb 2026) | 13 | 97.1% | 2.6% | 0.3% |
The pricing problem
Driftmail bills on total contacts. At the time of the test, 2,840 of my 12,400 contacts had not opened an email in over twelve months. I was paying for them. There is no native sunset automation, so removing them is a manual segment-and-delete you have to remember to run. That is roughly $23/month of pure waste, and it is waste the vendor has no incentive to help you avoid.
The migration did the thing that usually goes wrong
Verdict
Recommended. Deliverability is the job, and on a real list against a real baseline Driftmail did the job measurably better than what I was using. Budget for the unengaged-contact tax and set yourself a quarterly reminder to prune the list.
Changelog
Every change to this review since first publication, including the ones that lowered the score. Corrections are logged here, never made silently.
Five months on production. Placement stable at 96.8% across a further 21 sends. No score change.
Driftmail announced a sunset automation feature in beta. Not yet generally available; con retained until it ships.
First published after 94 days running as my production ESP.
Sources
Each source is recorded with the date it was read, because vendors change terms pages without notice.
- Driftmail pricing page — accessed
- Seed panel methodology and raw results — accessed