CategoryDelivery Improvement

January 27, 2021

Step by Step guide to fixing Gmail delivery

By laura

3 Min read

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27January

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. There are steps that work to get delivery fixed at Gmail. Verify that your mail is actually going to bulk. I had one client that had a bad /...

January 30, 2020

When opens hurt reputation

By laura

4 Min read

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30January

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails. I get maybe a dozen of this style of email a week. It’s pretty annoying but whatever. I delete them, blog about them or, very occasionally, share them with some folks who might have a big bigger of a stick to...

October 28, 2019

Purging to prevent spamtraps

By laura

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28October

Someone recently asked when they should purge addresses to remove spamtraps. To my mind this is actually the wrong question. Purging addresses that don’t engage is rarely about spamtraps, it’s about your overall communication processes. Well maintained traps will actively bounce mail for 6 – 12 months before turning the address into a trap. In those cases it’s mostly the whole...

September 26, 2019

An open is not permission

By laura

4 Min read

1 comment

26September

A decade or so ago I was helping a client troubleshoot a Spamhaus listing. They, as many companies do, had a database with addresses from a number of different sources. Spamhaus was asking for them to reconfirm the entire database, which they didn’t want to do. I came up with the idea that if we had some sign of activity on the email address, like an open or a click and some other...

June 13, 2019

Measurements

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

13June

One of the things I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about lately is how we measure deliverability. Standard deliverability measurements include: opens, bounces, complaints, and clicks. There are also other tools like probe accounts, panel data, and public blocklists. Taken together these measurements and metrics give us an overall view of how our mail is doing. More and more...

April 16, 2019

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

By laura

3 Min read

5 comments

16April

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process. As I was answering one of these questions I had a number of thoughts. I’ll share them here on the blog so I can find them in the future...

March 21, 2019

Dead addresses tell us things

By laura

3 Min read

2 comments

21March

There was confirmation this week that the increase in “user unknown” messages from Yahoo is actually Yahoo cleaning out abandoned accounts. At the same time a Yahoo is sending out notifications to folks to log into mail. The first thing every sender should do is remove all these Yahoo addresses from their lists. They’re done, kaput. Gone. There are some other things worth doing...

February 25, 2019

My domain reputation is bad, should I get a new domain?

By laura

2 Min read

2 comments

25February

Many companies have the occasional “oops” where they send email they probably shouldn’t have. This can often cause a decrease in reputation and subsequent delivery problems. Some companies rush to fix things by changing domains. Getting a new domain does not fix the problem! Brand new domains, those registered less than 30 days, have really bad reputations. Blame the spammers...

January 16, 2019

What’s a suspicious domain?

By laura

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16January

The question came up on slack and I started bullet pointing what would make a domain suspicious. Seemed like a reasonable blog post. In no particular order, some features that make a domain suspicious to spam filters. Domain is used in… … mail users complain about … mail users delete without reading … mail sent in bulk through the ISP (example: Censorship, Email and...

October 22, 2018

Marking mail as spam says what?

By laura

3 Min read

2 comments

22October

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.   Recently I’ve been getting spam to my womenofemail.org address asking about the wordtothewise.com website. I’m not sure where Ms. Catherine Metcalf bought my Women of Email address or...