Recent Posts

Why do my URLs have two dots?

• steve
• Nov 15, 2018

• Technical

You take a turn, I take a turn

At the SMTP level email is very much a simple line-by-line text based protocol. The client sends a command on a single line, the server responds with one or more lines (the last one marked by having a space in the fourth column), and then the client sends another command.

Return Path FBL page down

• laura
• Nov 14, 2018

• Industry

As of 6pm UTC the fbl.returnpath.com website is down. Return Path are aware of the issue and are working to fix it. I haven’t seen any estimated time to fix.

Why aren’t they answering my emails?

• laura
• Nov 12, 2018

• Industry

Anyone actively handling deliverability issues has had the experience of submitting a ticket or email and receiving no response. Alternatively, we get a boilerplate response that seems to not address the question. It happens to me, it happens to colleagues, it happens to everyone. One of the biggest challenges we face is taking that lack of response and channeling it into action items for our customers and clients.

Dedicated IPs, pros and cons

• laura
• Nov 8, 2018

• Best Practices

There’s a whole belief system built around the idea that the best way to get good deliverability is to have your own dedicated IPs. In fact, senders regularly approach me to ask when is the right time for them to get a dedicated IP. They assume all their deliverability problems will disappear if they get a dedicated IP.

Midterms in the US

• laura
• Nov 6, 2018

• Uncategorized

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

Tools aren’t a luxury

• laura
• Nov 5, 2018

• Best Practices

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

• steve
• Nov 2, 2018

• Technical

Thinking about filters

• laura
• Oct 31, 2018

• Industry

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

SaaS systems are spammer targets

• laura
• Oct 30, 2018

• Best Practices

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

• laura
• Oct 29, 2018

• Industry

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.