Recent Posts

About that cold email

Over the years I’ve made the decision to stop working with certain types of senders. Most recently it’s been the decision to not work with companies sending cold email. I even wrote a blog post back in 2018 about my frustration with clients who were upset their cold email was going to the spam folder. That was the beginning of the end for cold emailers as clients. I did continue to try and work with those senders, but they were incredibly frustrating engagements. I’d offer all my best practices, even try and work out how they could continue to use their purchased lists. They simply didn’t listen, they just didn’t want to hear that deliverability isn’t just about numbers and they couldn’t metric their way into the inbox. What they really wanted was me to tell them the One Weird Trick that would get their mail into the inbox.

You can't DKIM sign a cabbage

The DKIM specification and implementations of DKIM signing and validation code make some unstated assumptions about the environment they’re running in.

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.