Having a great delivery rates is actually a lot easier when you are big and famous, have your mail being signed by (and contain links to) a domain with excellen

Having a great delivery rates is actually a lot easier when you are big and famous, have your mail being signed by (and contain links to) a domain with excellent pagerank, have substantiation email volume, long emailing history and so on. But it gets much harder when you are running with a recently purchased domain on cold IPs or with the spammy subnet neighbors, your subnets are blocked by "know-it-all" small ESP admins. It is very similar to having a great credit history: you're getting approved for much nicer interest rates, there's no secret. So I don't believe an average person will get 37signals results simply by following Noah's advice. I work at Mailgun and we help startups and established companies get "37signals level" deliverability :) We also offer quite powerful parsing of incoming email into your app, so check out http://mailgun.net http://mailgun.net