Francis Davison

Francis Davison is the founder of SpamCipher and the author of its research. He built the platform as a full-loop cold email and deliverability system, reverse-engineering and rebuilding the entire sending and monitoring stack rather than wrapping someone else's tools.

He came to deliverability from an unusual place. Francis spent 15 years in high-stakes finance, in banking and wealth management, work that ran on sound judgment under pressure and disciplined analysis of risk. Inbox placement turned out to be the same problem in a different domain: continuous risk management on infrastructure you own, where the rules change without notice and the cost of getting it wrong is invisible until the pipeline dries up.

That is the lens behind these papers. Most cold email content is tactics. This research goes a layer down, into how the providers actually classify, detect, and penalize mail, cited to primary sources, so operators can make decisions from mechanism rather than folklore.

Every SpamCipher paper is a desk study built on primary sources: provider postmaster documentation and engineering posts, the RFCs that define email authentication, M3AAWG guidance, and published research on spam filtering, combined with SpamCipher's own measured data where we have it. Every non-obvious claim is traced to a source, and anything we cannot verify is left out rather than asserted.

More about the platform behind the research is on the About page.