Recent Posts

Stop with the incorrect SPF advice

Another day, another ESP telling a client to publish a SPF include for the wrong domain. It shouldn’t annoy me, really. It’s mostly harmless and it’s just an extra DNS look up for most companies. Heck, we followed Mailchimp’s advice and added their include to our bare root domain and it’s not really a huge deal for companies with only a couple SaaS providers. Still, it’s an incorrect recommendation and it does cause problems for some senders who are using multiple SaaS providers and Google.

Message not compliant with the RFCs

Every once in a while we’ll see a rejection from Yahoo that says RFCs 554 5.0.0 Message not accepted due to failed RFC compliance. What does that mean and what can we do about it?

Command Line Tools

Tools that you run from the command line – i.e. from a terminal or shell window – are often more powerful and quicker to use than their GUI or web equivalents.

Cleaning old lists

There comes a time in many marketers’ lives where they are faced with and old, stale database and a management chain that wants to mail those addresses. Smart marketers know that delivery problems will arise if they just reactivate all those users. They also know that mailing older addresses can affect current and engaged addresses as well. Still, many executives think there is no downside to mailing old addresses.

Apple MPP reporting and geolocation

A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently.

Apple MPP

You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June.

About the Apple thing

A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change.

Domains and Reputation

(Copied and lightly edited from a Facebook post)

It occurred to me as I was commenting elsewhere that there is a lot of confusion about domains / subdomains and where they’re used in emails.
I get confused when people talk about ‘domain reputation’ because I have at least 4 distinct places where domains show up in an email that heavily influence delivery. But a lot of other folks talk about domain reputation as a single thing. I can never work out which place they’re talking about and thus find it difficult to comment on the domain reputation.

What’s the best opt-in method?

Kickbox interviewed a bunch of us to find out what methods of opt-in we recommend. Go check it out.

Step by Step guide to fixing Gmail delivery

I regularly see folks asking how to fix their Gmail delivery. This is a perennial question (see my 2019 post and the discussions from various industry experts in the comments). Since that discussion I haven’t seen as much complaining about problems.