Recent Posts

The Challenges of B2B deliverability

Tomorrow Laura will be giving a webinar as part of the MarketingProfs Summer series. She’ll be speaking specifically about Rising to the Challenge of B2B Deliverability. This talk discusses the fundamental differences between business and consumer mailboxes and how we can’t just apply consumer mailbox deliverability advice to a business environment.

SWAKS on macOS

• steve
• Technical

SWAKS is my favorite SMTP debugging tool.

A new SMTP server I’m building loses pipelining synchronization when connecting via TLS, and I’m sure the bug will be simple to spot if I can send some test messages in to it and watch the sequence of commands. SWAKS is perfect for that.

Deliverability Summit Amsterdam

• steve
• Industry

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

Google and Alignment Update

• laura
• Industry

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.

What Spamtraps Tell Us

• laura
• Industry

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.

Do spamtraps exist?

• laura
• Industry

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.

Google, Alignment and DMARC

• laura
• Best practices

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.

Setting up a smarthost

• steve
• Technical

We run most of our own network services – inbound and outbound email, DNS and web presence. We run separate services for inbound and outbound email to give us more flexibility in how we set things up.

How to choose an ESP based on deliverability

• steve
• Delivery improvement

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.

Don’t add your domain to the Public Suffix List

• steve
• Technical

(At least, not if you ever intend to use it for email. It might break the domain for email, maybe forever.)