Recent Posts

The Future of Deliverability

There always seems to be appetite from folks to read the tea leaves and follow up with predictions about what the future holds. I mean, how many folks in the US are obsessively refreshing polls for the last few weeks? (American’s: don’t forget to vote on Tuesday!)

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No, Gmail did not just break all open tracking

I was avoiding commenting on the email open tracking bad take that seems to be going viral round the more gullible corners of LinkedIn.

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DNS Failures

We use DNS a lot in email, particularly for authentication, so diagnosing why DNS isn’t returning what we expect it to is a pretty common challenge. And DNS responses aren’t exactly the clearest thing to understand.

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The Economics of Cold Outreach

It’s time we talk about cold outreach mail. In the last 2 years the volume and aggressiveness of cold outreach mail seems to have exploded. There are dozens of companies out there who are selling services to companies to facilitate cold outreach. My own sales mailbox is full of requests from companies to help them solve their delivery problems.

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Bears and Spam Filters

“Why is my inbox full of spam, while I still can’t get the mail I send into the inbox reliably?” — most email marketers at some point in their career.

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Prefetches and Proxies

Jody asks “Are ‘prefetch opens’ and ‘proxy opens’ the same thing?”

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Sendy and one-click unsubscribe

If you’re using sendy and you’ve found that RFC 8058 one click unsubscribe fails – or, worse, seems to work but doesn’t actually unsubscribe the user – you should take a look at James’ workaround.

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Sending domains and hostnames

Lots of times I see someone asking a question and they talk about their sending domain. And it’s sometimes not 100% clear which domain they mean by that – and when we’re talking about alignment and reputation it can make a difference. So here’s a list of (some of?) the different places a mailserver uses a domain.

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If you’re using Entrust for your BIMI VMC …

BIMI is the protocol you can use to publish an icon to display in the inbox of some large consumer webmail providers. To have it displayed at Gmail you need more than just clean DMARC and a published BIMI record, you also need to have a Verified Mark Certificate, a VMC.

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DMARC: The good, the bad and the ugly

A series of red arrows pointed left and one green arrow pointing right.

DMARC is the newest of the authentication protocols. It compares the domain in the From: address to the domains authenticated by SPF and DKIM. If either SPF or DKIM pass and they are in the same organizational domain as the domain in the From: address then the email is authenticated with DMARC.

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