Despite what a lot of SEO slop will try and tell you there’s no way to measure deliverability performance across multiple ESPs in any way that’s meaningful. (The SEO slop tends to do things like sign up for free accounts at a bunch of ESPs, send three emails to probe accounts and see how many reach the inbox at mailbox providers served by the probe account service. If you’re a...
A very short post about diagnosing hard bounces, because I’ve had to give the same advice to a dozen folks over the past few months. When you’re diagnosing and mitigating hard bounce rates the first thing you’ll see is your ESPs dashboard or reporting. It’ll tell you how many emails you sent bounced, and how that number has changed over time. A useful start. But a hard...
When a mailbox provider rejects or defers an email it sends back a message explaining why. Those messages begin with a three digit number (starting with a “5” for rejections and a “4” for deferrals), followed by text that explains why the mail wasn’t accepted. That text often contains a link to follow for more information, or a mailbox provider specific code you can...
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. A VMC is a certificate, very similar in many ways to the TLS certificates used to secure webpages. It’s issued by a...
I always want to say “Emails, and Opens, and Clicks… Oh My!” when I’m talking about them. We really want to understand how a mailbox provider perceives the streams of email we send them. Some of the things the provider looks at are technical and objective – is the email coming from who it claims to be coming from? Is there an attachment that contains a virus? We have...
A still from Cargo Cult, by Bastien Dubois During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like...
It’s deliverability week, so everyone is talking about deliverability. But I’d like to take a moment to mention deliverability’s evil twin from the mirror universe – filter evasion. The goal of filter evasion seems at first sight very similar to that of deliverability – put the email in the inbox – but the two practices start from very different places...
Mailbox providers want happy recipients Mailbox providers want their users to be happy with the mail they receive and the service they get. That’s driven by stark business reasons: acquiring new users is costly, happy users bring in revenue – whether directly, or indirectly via advertising – and their word of mouth helps bring in more users, and hence more revenue. That’s...
What is Deliverability Week? Al Iverson decided it should happen, and asked a bunch of deliverability folks to share some of their thoughts about the deliverability industry – why do we do this? where did we come from? what’s next? Monday Al’s summary of the day, Deliverability Week: Why deliverability matters to us. Deliverability Matters, and welcome to Deliverability Week...
Next week everyone will be talking Deliverability.
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