Recent Posts

The key to improving deliverability

• laura
• Feb 18, 2020

• Best Practices

According to the UK DMA, marketers report improvements in deliverability after GDPR went into effect.

Address verification doesn’t fix any real problem

• laura
• Feb 17, 2020

• Industry

Would you trust an address verification company that used twitter spam to advertise their product?

Stop obsessing about open rates

• laura
• Feb 12, 2020

• Best Practices

In 2020:

• 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report.
• The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates.
• A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.
• A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.
• An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how inaccurate open rates are.

The industry needs to stop obsessing over open rates.

The OSI Seven Layer Model

• steve
• Feb 11, 2020

• Industry , Technical

In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization).

Some Microsoft thoughts

• laura
• Feb 10, 2020

• Industry

Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec.

Your first M3AAWG meeting

• laura
• Feb 4, 2020

• Industry

It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight.

When opens hurt reputation

• laura
• Jan 30, 2020

• Delivery Improvement

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails.

Using Reply-To:

• laura
• Jan 29, 2020

• Best Practices

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned.

Troubleshooting: part 3

• laura
• Jan 27, 2020

• Industry

As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?”

What about the email client?

• laura
• Jan 23, 2020

• Industry

There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing.