A still from Cargo Cult, by Bastien Dubois During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like...
Filter Evasion
It’s deliverability week, so everyone is talking about deliverability. But I’d like to take a moment to mention deliverability’s evil twin from the mirror universe – filter evasion. The goal of filter evasion seems at first sight very similar to that of deliverability – put the email in the inbox – but the two practices start from very different places...
Deliverability is Collaborative
Mailbox providers want happy recipients Mailbox providers want their users to be happy with the mail they receive and the service they get. That’s driven by stark business reasons: acquiring new users is costly, happy users bring in revenue – whether directly, or indirectly via advertising – and their word of mouth helps bring in more users, and hence more revenue. That’s...
It’s Deliverability Week
What is Deliverability Week? Al Iverson decided it should happen, and asked a bunch of deliverability folks to share some of their thoughts about the deliverability industry – why do we do this? where did we come from? what’s next? Monday Al’s summary of the day, Deliverability Week: Why deliverability matters to us. Deliverability Matters, and welcome to Deliverability Week...
Deliverability Week
Next week everyone will be talking Deliverability.
Inbox Jam
ISKBTN
Spam Resource
EmailKarma
Us
… and more.
SWAKS: Test your SMTP
We’ve mentioned SWAKS here a few times – but I always use it for delivering test mail directly to a recipient’s MX.
Matt, over at EmailKarma, posted today pointing out that it supports authentication, so you can also use it to send email out from your commercial smarthost. Handy.
Check it out.
No, Google doesn’t hate responsive design
I’ve seen a bunch of folks panic about some phrasing in Google’s Email sender guidelines. Buried deep in the Message formatting section Google say: Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as spam. Read literally that might cause you to wonder about your use of CSS display:none to switch between different content on...
DNS for white label authentication with SproutDNS
I wrote last year about using “stunt” nameservers for customer subdomain authentication – i.e. dynamically generating all the authentication records needed in DNS for each customer as needed. For example, if you’re an ESP that has customers who can’t or won’t use their own domains and you still need to give them unique subdomains you can generate CNAME records...
Deliverability Summit 2024
We just got back from Amsterdam a couple of days ago, after attending the Deliverability Summit. It may have been the best email event I’ve been to in several years. Not too big, not too small. Plenty of space and time to meet up with folks. Mostly great sessions, a better average than most conferences. Well organized, at a lovely location, with a safe and welcoming environment. Andrew et...
Anatomy of a Received header
When trying to find out why Something Went Wrong during delivery of an email we sometimes want to look at the route by which it was delivered. Did SPF break because of an unexpected forward? Did DKIM break because an intermediate mailserver modified the content of the message? Why did it take nine hours from the mail leaving our ESP to make it to the inbox? Did it really leave our ESP when they...