I’ve seen a bunch of folks panic about some phrasing in Google’s Email sender guidelines. Buried deep in the Message formatting section Google say: Don’t use HTML and CSS to hide content in your messages. Hiding content might cause messages to be marked as spam. Read literally that might cause you to wonder about your use of CSS display:none to switch between different content on...
Deliverability Summit 2024
We just got back from Amsterdam a couple of days ago, after attending the Deliverability Summit. It may have been the best email event I’ve been to in several years. Not too big, not too small. Plenty of space and time to meet up with folks. Mostly great sessions, a better average than most conferences. Well organized, at a lovely location, with a safe and welcoming environment. Andrew et...
Looking back, looking forward
Six years ago today I wrote here “Spam isn’t going away“, talking about systemic problems at Google, Cloudflare and Amazon and in India. If I were writing it today I might mention Microsoft, Salesforce and ExactTarget as well as Google, and might stress Amazon less (mostly because all the Amazon spam sites tend to be hidden behind Cloudflare, so you don’t know...
Are you a grown-up sender?
Yes, it’s another yahoogle best practices post. Google divide their requirements for senders into those sending more than 5,000 messages a day, and those sending less. Yahoo divide their requirements into “All Senders” and “Bulk Senders”, and explicitly don’t define that via a volume threshold: “A bulk sender is classified as an email sender sending a...
Yahoogle FAQs
Just a very, very short post with links to the Yahoo and Google requirements FAQs. Given I can’t ever remember them I’m guessing lots of y’all can’t either.
Yahoo: and :
Answers to your questions about the new Yahoo and Google technical requirements
On January 9th at 6pm GMT, 1pm EST and 10am PST I’ll be speaking with Nout Boctor-Smith of Nine Lives Digital about the new Yahoo and Google technical requirements. In this webinar you’ll: Learn more about what these new email sender guidelines entail and how they differ from the status quo Understand why you’re being asked to do things that were previously handled by your...
Tis the Season
Meanwhile…
I apparently gave chess.com an email address in 2007 – probably due to a client engagement? I don’t know. I unsubscribed from their mail at some point as there has only been one email from them between 2010 and 2021. Maybe this time they’ll actually unsubscribe me.
Wildcards and DKIM and DMARC, oh my!
If you’re an ESP with small customers you may have looked at the recent Google / Yahoo requirements around DMARC-style alignment for authentication and panicked a bit. Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.…For direct mail, the domain in the...
Deferrals at Microsoft
If you’re seeing a lot of “451 4.7.500 Server busy. Please try again later” from Office365 this morning you’re not alone. Microsoft are aware of the issue, and incident EX680695 says: Current status: We’ve identified that specific IP addresses are being unexpectedly limited by our anti-spam procedures, causing inbound external email delivery to become throttled and delayed...
When Asking a Question
A lot of beginner questions about email delivery aren’t about broad strategies for success, or technical details about authentication, or concerns about address acquisition. They’re something like: My mail to $ISP is being blocked. How do I contact someone there? Asking a question to your peers about how to deal with a concrete problem you’re having is a great thing to do...