Authorsteve

Deliverability Summit Amsterdam

We’ll be speaking at the Deliverability Summit in Amsterdam on April 24th and 25th.

If you have your tickets, come say hi!

If you don’t have tickets yet there are still a few in-person tickets available, as well as on-line access.

Setting up a smarthost

Deploying a new smarthost using Postfix and other open source components. And why you probably shouldn't do that.

How to choose an ESP based on deliverability

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...

Diagnosing Hard Bounces

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...

Tracking link maths

How long does a tracking link need to be? Let’s make it interesting, and say we want to be able to have a unique tracking link for every single atom in the observable universe. That’s about 1080 unique links. One hundred novemdecillion exa-links. 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 If we have that many customers...

There’s text and then there’s text

If you want to send someone an email with some text in it there are quite a few different ways you can do it. The main differences are the ways the text is packaged up in MIME entities to be sent. text/plain This is the simplest sort of text you can send. If you send a simple email with many desktop mail clients, this is what you get. You can’t include images, you can’t choose fonts...

Your bounce classification is a bit rubbish

When a mailbox provider rejects or defers an email it sends back a message explaining why. Those messages begin with a three digit number (starting with a “5” for rejections and a “4” for deferrals), followed by text that explains why the mail wasn’t accepted. That text often contains a link to follow for more information, or a mailbox provider specific code you can...

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