How much has changed and will change

I was on a call with a client today and they wanted to talk about the handshake agreement about bounce handling I mentioned last week. As I started to really talk about it, I realised how much has changed in the years since that meeting. 

It was a bit of the wild west of email and spam. CAN SPAM didn’t exist. Gmail didn’t exist. Global email volume, even including spam probably didn’t top a billion emails a day. Return Path didn’t offer certification. Ironport had outgoing email appliances. Bonded Sender was the only certification in town. SNDS wasn’t a thing. Feedback loops didn’t exist. This is spam buttons and spam folders didn’t exist.

The industry has drastically changed in the last decade and a half. I see us entering another explosive period of change. Just the last few days I’ve heard of multiple new outgoing MTAs. A few years ago it looked like everything had consolidated on MessageSystems. Now, other players are moving in to that market. How mail is filtered is diverging and the old delivery rules and best practices are becoming more and more receiver specific.

This isn’t a “what’s happening in 2019.” I don’t have any specific predictions. I just know I’ve been watching this industry enough that I’m seeing signs that we’re entering into another period of growth and expansion.

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Email in 2020

time_report_forblogLate last year Litmus invited me to contribute to a whitepaper they were putting together about email in 2020. Today, they released Email Marketing in 2020. I am honored to be included in the list of experts that they chose.
One of the things I find so so much fun in participating in this type of joint project is seeing what other people’s visions are. When Chad first contacted us, his request was very simple. He wanted 400-ish words on what we thought would change. We all approached it from our own perspectives. The final document really touches on a wide range of changes and gives an bright and rosy view of the future of email.
It’s hard to imagine I’ve had email for more than 25 years. It’s become such a fundamental and critical part of my life. I mean, sure I’m an email professional but it’s more than that. Some of my best friends I met over email. I’ve gotten multiple jobs based on my presence on email discussion lists. Steve and I met around email. One of the fun bits of M3AAWG is that I get to see friends I first met almost 20 years ago over email.
Email has really changed in the last decade. It is now a critical part of daily life for many people. Even social networking would be nowhere without an email address. Email really is the key to the digital kingdom. That’s not going to change.
Email being the key to the digital kingdom is a challenge. It lets nefarious people into our homes and into our lives and into our computers. A lot of very smart people are working on how to make email safer for us. I think it will be much safer in 2020, through the hard work and dedication of a lot of people.
I strongly encourage you to download the Email Marketing in 2020 white paper from Litmus. There is a lot of insight. It will be fun to see how much of what was said becomes reality.

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Email related predictions for 2010

As my recent series of posts has indicated, I am seeing a lot of future changes in the email industry.

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Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

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