Ask the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?
Things you need to read: 2/5/16
T
RSS - Posts
Hi Laura,
As you pointed out previously about “technical debt”, all of us in the Email industry need to come together to help with this area. It is definitely an area that needs to be looked into due to the recent changes in the Email space with Security/Compliance/Filtering. I hope this is a topic that is discussed more at M3AAWG 36.
2/5/16 is 2-May-2016 to most of the world.
Yes, I know email is an American thing.
I dunno how much coming together there needs to be. Folks just need to make the decision to commit development (both technical and product) effort to enable things like key rotation and unique keys.
There will be some discussion. But, like most things in the email space, the commitments will be mostly driven by inbox delivery. If you can do problematic things and still get in the inbox then the resources won’t be committed.
Funny story about that.
A few weeks ago we spent the weekend with friends at a lovely house out on the Sonoma Coast. Part of the weekend is different people cooking yummy food. Steve was part of the Saturday dinner crew and he decided to make bread pudding. He uses a wonderful recipe from Gary Rhodes that involves a bruleed top. So we brought our brulee torch, but it go left in the car. Steve kept mentioning needing to get the torch from the car.
I kept wondering why it was so important that we bring in a flashlight. What? Why? Huh? Eventually I needed to grab something out of the car and he said, “And grab the torch from the front seat.” I was still confused as to why a flashlight was so important, until I got to the car and realized that he didn’t mean a torch, he meant a torch. I was mentally translating UK – American when I shouldn’t have been. Oops.
I see enough non-US style dates to have to think about it. But I have never been able to bring myself to write dates that way. Even as I understand and support that the US style is Bad and Wrong.
Hi Laura,
I think the email Eco-system would be a lot better if the community (ISPs/receivers) came together and put in place processes that needed to be followed in order for the Eco-system to be healthier and ultimately help against abuse. Just like you said “… Folks just need to make the decision to commit development (both technical and product)..” if the ISPs/receivers implemented those processes then Email Service Providers have to follow them. A very good example is when the DKIM 512bit key was broken by Zach Harris. The point being that if given the choice it will not happen but if it was mandatory then we have no choice but to follow. I hope one day the ISPs/receivers decide to come together to have standard SMTP responses for all but that will most likely never happen as each does their own “thing”. It would definitely help towards the healthier email Eco-system we are moving and working towards to.