Recent Posts

Midterms in the US

It’s probably one of the most consequential midterm elections in the US ever.

I was on the phone with a colleague recently. They were talking about collecting a bit of data over the weekend and mentioned how great it was they had the tools to be able to do this. Coincidentally, another colleague mentioned that when the subscription bombing happened they were able to react quickly because they had a decent tool chain. I’ve also been working with some clients who are dealing with compliance issues but don’t have the tools they need.

Captchas

Thinking about filters

Much of the current deliverability advice focuses on a few key ideas:

SaaS systems are spammer targets

There are probably hundreds of thousands of really awesome SaaS products out there. They provide a framework to do all sorts of stuff that used to be really hard to do. Almost all of them include some email component. They dutifully build the email piece into their platform and, because they’re smart, they outsource the actual sending to one of SMTP providers. They’re happy, their customers are happy, and spammers are happy.

Transactional mail can be spam

Marketers have a thing about transactional mail. In the US, transactional mail is exempt from many of the CAN SPAM regulations. If they label a mail transactional, then they can send it even when the recipient has opted-out! The smart marketer looks for opportunities to send transactional mail so they can ~~bother~~ spam get their brand in front of people who’ve opted out.

Resources for safer conferences

The MAAWG conference was held in Brooklyn a few weeks ago. Many positive discussions and sessions happened at the conference. But there was an incident of harassment during the conference where one participant assaulted multiple other attendees during late evening activities. I’m not going to speak too much to what happened as I wasn’t there. What I will say is that I am proud of my friends and colleagues who stepped up to make sure that the targets of the harassment made it safely to their rooms. I’m also pleased that the conference pulled the harasser’s badge and banned him from the conference in short order.

Marking mail as spam says what?

I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were.

SPF and TXT records and Go

A few days ago Laura noticed a bug in one of our in-house tools – it was sometimes marking an email as SPF Neutral when it should have been a valid SPF pass. I got around to debugging it today and traced it back to a bug in the Go standard library.

Jane! Stop this crazy thing!

One of the consequences of moving to Ireland is I’m unsubscribing from most commercial mail, including some lists I’ve been on for a decade or more. Sadly, many of the companies don’t ship to Ireland, or their shipping costs are prohibitively expensive. Even if I wanted to purchase from them, I couldn’t.