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Spam is never timely nor relevant

One of the ongoing recommendations to improve deliverability is to send email that is timely and relevant to the recipient. The idea being that if you send mail a recipient wants, they’re more likely to interact with it in a way that signals to the mailbox provider that the message is wanted. The baseline for that, at least whenever I’ve talked about timely and relevant, is that the...

Doing our part

Spent the afternoon marching through the streets of Dublin with thousands of students demanding climate action now.

Should you publish a DMARC policy statement?

DMARC is a protocol that makes it very, very simple to shoot yourself in the foot. Setup is tricky and if you don’t get it exactly right you risk creating deliverability problems. The vast majority of companies SHOULD NOT publish a DMARC policy with p=reject or p=quarantine for their existing domains. DMARC policy statements are, essentially, a way for a company to assert the following...

Spamming for deliverability

This morning I woke up to a job offer. I hear a number of other email deliverability folks received the same job offer. I am writing to you from [Company].  We are one of the oldest and best reputed partners for Salesforce.  We have succeeded because we only hire the best, most experienced developers.  We have a need for an excellent expert in deliverability.  We have been...

Null sender address

A question came up on the email geeks slack channel about empty from addresses. I asked if they meant the 5321 or 5322 from address which prompted a question about if you could even have a null 5321 from. Yes, you can and it’s commonly used for some types of email. 5321.from is the bounce address, and the domain used in SPF authentication. Null addresses, literally <>, are used for email...

When you can’t get a response

I’ve seen a bunch of folks in different places looking for advice on what to do when they can’t get a response from a postmaster team, or a filtering company. I was all set to write yet another post about how silence is an answer. Digging through the archives, though, I see I’ve written about this twice already in the last 18 months. Well. OK then. Instead of retreading...

Update on Tulsi Gabbard sues Google

Back in July the Tulsi Gabbard campaign sued Google for deactivating their “advertising account” on the night of the first Democratic debate. I’ve been waiting for the Google response, which was due to be filed today. I checked today and found a new filing. Apparently counsel for both sides got together recently and decided that Tulsi’s campaign was going to submit an...

Yahoo having problems

Yahoo seems to be having some massive system issues the last 24 hours or so. DNS has been down, mail was down. I’m seeing reports things are coming back now, but there’s a lot of backed up mail traffic and the congestion may take a few hours to resolve. If you have the ability to do traffic shaping on the sending end, now would be a good time to be extra conservative in your sending...

To no-reply or not

One of the ongoing arguments in deliverability is whether or not to use no-reply in the From address of email marketing. There are very strong opinions on both sides. I’ve even had people ask me to comment or ask me to back up their particular point of view. My point of view is pretty simple. This is a customer relationship issue not a delivery issue. The presence of a no-reply@ address in...

DMARC doesn’t fix phishing

Over the last few weeks I’ve had a lot of discussions with folks about DMARC and the very slow adoption. A big upsurge and multiple Facebook discussions were triggered by the ZDNet article DMARCs abysmal adoption explains why email spoofing is still a thing. There are a lot of reasons DMARC’s adoption has been slow, and I’m working on a more comprehensive discussion. But one of...

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