It’s not always easy to know what the actual headers and body of an email as sent look like. For a long time accepted wisdom was that you could send a copy to your gmail account, and use the Show Original menu option to, well, see the original message as raw text. It turns out that’s not actually something you can trust. I used swaks to send a test message with an extra header to my...
New Requirements for Bulk Senders
UPDATE: You need to authenticate with both DKIM and SPF. Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog. So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something. If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February: Set up SPF or DKIM email...
Is email dead?
These last few years have been something, huh? Something had to give and, in my case, that something was blogging. There were a number of reasons I stopped writing here, many of them personal, some of them more global. I will admit, I was (and still am a little) burned out as it seemed I was saying and writing the same things I’d been saying and writing for more than a decade. Taking time...
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. 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 /...
Back at it
Back at the office after traveling to visit a bunch of our US friends recently. A lot of news, both in and out of the email space, happened while we were gone. The biggest stories are outside the email space and I will admit to following the coronavirus news probably closer than I should. (My graduate work was done across the hall from one of the major avian epidemic monitoring labs. This is the...
When opens hurt reputation
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...
Same MX, different filters
One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter. Part of that script classifies domains hosted by Google apps as a separate filter...
Google IP reputation bad
This morning hundreds of delivery folks logged into their Google Postmaster Tools account to see their IP reputation was bad.
Even one of my client’s that is using a major ESP shared pools is seeing bad IP reputation on December 10, 2019.
The good news is this doesn’t seem to be affecting delivery. Most folks are reporting no delivery issues at Gmail and no change in open rates.
Tulsi Gabbard Sues Google
Today Tulsi Gabbard’s campaign sued Google for $50 million. Why? Because during the night of the first debate Google disabled her “advertising account” (I’m assuming she means adwords) preventing her from being able to purchase ads to direct searchers to her website. There’s also a paragraph in there that they’re “disproportionally putting her email into...
Google Postmaster is Back
Late last night folks started mentioning they were seeing data trickled into Google Postmaster tools. This morning, some of the domains for some of my clients are showing data.
Things aren’t fully back to normal, some of my clients are still showing no data for the last week. But things are getting back to normal and it looks like we will have older data.