The field that tells you who's hurting your deliverability

Good Morning {{first_name}}!

It’s Wednesday - and that means it’s time for your Property Playbook - an issue where we dig into properties and fields. Because, yay. 🥳

With Google tightening their spam report requirements, you need to add this next step to any reporting you do moving forward. Luckily, HubSpot has a field you can leverage right away.

Grab your drink of choice. This one moves fast.

Let's get into it.

Object: Contact Property

This little field is an automated, read-only HubSpot contact property.

HubSpot tracks how many marketing emails have been sent to a contact since their last open or link click. That number lives in “hs_email_sends_since_last_engagement” and it updates automatically.

No workflow required. No custom property needed. The field is already there.

100% filled.

If you work in email marketing, you’ve checked open rates and CTRs every month or after every send. It’s part of the routine. It’s part of our email performance and health check.

But checking “hs_email_sends_since_last_engagement” allows you to check if a contact has received 14 emails without a single open or click. This is not "low engagement." That’s zero engagement.

A high number in this field tells you a few things at once.

First, your nurture sequence has not found the right message or the right moment for this person.

Second, continued sending is now actively hurting your domain reputation with every send.

Third, for existing customers especially, this is a retention signal worth paying attention to.

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Play 1: The Sunset Trigger

Set an active list in HubSpot where “hs_email_sends_since_last_engagement” is greater than or equal to 10. Enroll that list into a short re-permission sequence of one or two emails maximum. Anyone who does not click gets suppressed from marketing sends. This protects your domain. (Review clients vs. MQLs in this one first with the team to ensure that this makes sense).

Play 2: The Re-Engagement Split

Before suppression, send one last email with a clear value offer and a low-friction CTA, something like "Still want these?" For B2B contacts, a content asset or a direct question works better than a discount. Look at clicks more than opens. Anyone who clicks re-enters your active nurture, and anyone who does not comes off the list.

Play 3: The Customer Carve-Out

Filter your active customer contacts separately. A customer at 12+ sends with no engagement needs a different conversation than a cold lead does. Consider routing these contacts to a sales or account management touchpoint rather than continuing to market to them. The relationship is there, but the email channel may just not be the right one anymore.

In HubSpot, navigate to Contacts, then Lists, and create an active list filtered by “Sends Since Last Engagement,” where this is greater than or equal to 10. Save it and look at the number. That is your current deliverability risk pool. From there, you can build the suppression workflow or the re-permission sequence directly off that list.

If this is the conversation you have been putting off, 44fjord works with teams to build the foundation that makes these numbers trustworthy. If you want to talk about what a partnership could look like, reach out to the team using the contact form on 44fjord.com/contact

TL;DR

Google used to be kinder when it came to spam reports. The threshold used to be forgiving, but in 2026, it is not. One complaint per thousand sends is the new line, and inactive contacts sitting in your database are the fastest way to cross it. The good news is HubSpot has already been tracking this for you.

The field exists, and the data is there. The only question is whether you are looking at it.