Word to the Wise helps email marketers create more effective email messages, programs and infrastructures. We advise you how to skillfully navigate the constant business, technology, and policy challenges so your messages reach your customers.
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Earlier this month, I published a post about some changes with how Google is displaying information related to authentication in their “View Original” page. There’s one condition I apparently didn’t report and it brought up a question earlier today. If a message has alignment between DKIM and the 5322.from address but there is no DMARC record for that domain published in...
Many blocklists use spamtraps to detect poor sending practices and will cite spamtrap hits as the reason for the blocks. Senders legitimately fear spamtraps showing up on their lists because of this. If spamtraps weren’t used by blocklists no one would really care about them. They’re just another kind of bad address. Yesterday I answered a question about whether or not spamtraps...
One of the folks on the Email Geeks slack asked me a question last week that I thought was really insightful and has a somewhat nuanced answer. Do spamtraps really exist? Like, in the sense of being a real mailbox? They actually exist just like any other mailbox, yes? Otherwise they can’t be monitored and reported on. This includes typo spamtraps, correct? Do spamtraps exist? A spam trap...
Google has been making a number of changes to their systems over the last few weeks. Folks are seeing a lot of changes in Google postmaster tools and they’re seeing changes in how Google is displaying headers in the “show original” tab. One thing that some folks were seeing is a message that says: This “Alignment” description replaced the DMARC verdict in the header...
Deploying a new smarthost using Postfix and other open source components. And why you probably shouldn't do that.
Despite what a lot of SEO slop will try and tell you there’s no way to measure deliverability performance across multiple ESPs in any way that’s meaningful. (The SEO slop tends to do things like sign up for free accounts at a bunch of ESPs, send three emails to probe accounts and see how many reach the inbox at mailbox providers served by the probe account service. If you’re a...
Adding your domain to the public suffix list might break all your email.
I’ve been doing a lot of my question answering over on the Email Geeks slack and have decided to bring some of the answers over here. Today’s question: My ESP provides a dashboard of spam complaints. How should I be looking at the data? Are some complaints more important than others? The spam complaint dashboard is a record of the feed back loop messages (FBLs) that an ESP has...
A very short post about diagnosing hard bounces, because I’ve had to give the same advice to a dozen folks over the past few months. When you’re diagnosing and mitigating hard bounce rates the first thing you’ll see is your ESPs dashboard or reporting. It’ll tell you how many emails you sent bounced, and how that number has changed over time. A useful start. But a hard...
In October 2023, Yahoo and Google announced new standards for sending bulk mail to their systems. For bulk senders these changes included requiring aligned authentication and publishing a DMARC record and complying with the List-Unsubscribe RFC. The ISPs also formally announced complaints must stay below a threshold of 0.3%. At the time of the announcement, they said enforcement would start in...
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