Email Blogs
Iterable “is the customer activation platform that helps brands deliver joyful experiences with harmonized, individualized, and dynamic communications at scale” — and they’re hiring! The role: Manager, Email Deliverability. In that role, you’ll “drive education, excellence, and innovation in deliverability and compliance across our entire organization and in all of our products, services, and systems, and partner cross-functionally to develop and execute an inspiring vision and strategic business plan to make deliverability and compliance a competitive advantage, and to scale it at the pace of our growth.” And more. For details and/or to apply, click on through.
Subdomains are “sub entries” under your domain name. Sometimes they’re more accurately called hostnames or FQDNs (“fully qualified domain names”) but for simplicity’s sake, I’m mostly just going to call them subdomains here.You’re reading this on Spam Resource, which has a website address of www.spamresource.com, of which spamresource.com is the domain name. If I were going to create a subdomain for my email newsletter, I might choose email.spamresource.com. In this case, email.spamresource.com is a subdomain of spamresource.com.If you send different types of email messages in any significant volume (at least thousands monthly), you might want to consider having separate subdomains for different from addresses for different types of emails that you send.Let’s say you’re Jeremy Bonto, founder of the famous Bontocorp conglomerate, a company that sells a lot of widgets to people, and also has a lot of employees. It is potentially a good practice for Bontocorp to not send
Dear Colleagues at ESPs, We have a problem. More specifically, YOU have a problem. You have a spam problem. One that you’re not taking care of in any way, shape or form. There was a point where ESPs started caring about spam out of their networks. They got blocked enough they had to take action. Because they took action a lot of the big blocklists started being nice. Spamhaus, for instance, would do ‘informational’ listings so that ESPs could fix things rather than going to a direct block. This led management at ESPs to start to think they had this spam thing under control. They stopped worrying too much about spam and compliance. I mean, to management the whole point of having a compliance desk is to stop the blocks. No blocks mean no problems with spam out of the network, right? As someone who gets a lot of B2B
If you haven’t figured it out just yet, I’m trying to do webinars more often nowadays, because it’s a very useful way to share information, and people always seem to be interested in learning more about deliverability. The topic this time around is Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP). You know, that thing screwing up the open detection pixel your email service provider platform uses to help you
Maybe you have seen this in your inbox test results before? Here’s the scenario. Perhaps your inbox placement testing tool has a dozen seed addresses for a specific ISP or mailbox provider. For that provider, for the message you sent, ten of seed addresses show inbox delivery, but the other two seed addresses show spam folder placement. Confusing, right? What IS your reputation at this mailbox provider? Does this count as spam folder placement or inbox placement? And what should you do about it? Read on to find out.This is what I (jokingly) call the Pepsi Challenge. When you see results like this at an ISP or mailbox provider, it’s because the mailbox provider is doing testing, inviting a sample of your (their) subscriber base to provide feedback on your email messages. It’s a taste test, of sorts, where the mailbox provider wants to know if your flavor of email
If you weren’t able to make it to the Deliverability 101 webinar I presented with Insightly back in late June, we’ve got you covered. Here’s a wonderful summary from Insightly’s Val Riley, recapping all that we talked about and helping to break down the key points that drive deliverability knowledge and understanding. There you’ll also find a link to a recording of the webinar itself. Thanks to Insightly’s Melinda Prescher and Chip House, for co-presenting and bringing us together, respectively.
This is all subject to change, of course. Currently, we’re only as far as the first version of the iOS 16 Public Beta, and much could be different by the time we get to the actual final (non-beta) release version of iOS, which is said to launch late in 2022. But already, BIMI logo support is indeed in there, as you can see from screenshots of this email from Zillow, as viewed on my trusty iPhone SE (2020). Never have I been so happy so see a squiggly Z before today.In my testing, I found that the logo shows only for mail sent to iCloud accounts; I tested this with Gmail as well (both in the iOS Mail application) and logos didn’t work for any non-Apple domain recipients. Will that change? I hope so; it’d be nice if this were recipient-domain agnostic, like how Apple MPP is. Also, logos don’t show
This is a question that I get asked often: If somebody sends an email message that is 100% images, does that design choice itself make the message more likely to get relegated to the spam folder? My short answer is no, not really, but it merits a discussion, so let’s dive into it a little bit deeper.First, let’s get this bit out of the way — YES, some spam filters will score emails higher (more spammy) if the image-to-text ratio is low – meaning that a message contains little text, but is chock full of images. SpamAssassin is an example of a filter that will note this in its filtering results. But while SpamAssassin can be good for “broad strokes” guidance for email senders, this is an example case where SpamAssassin’s filters give different results compared to the spam filtering engines of the biggest ISPs and mailbox providers like Gmail
Founded in 2003, Lashback is a company offering marketing compliance tools specific to things like ensuring that affiliates and marketing partners respect unsubscribes and do not misuse data. It’s not a realm I know a ton about — I personally was more familiar Lashback’s “UBL” – Unsubscribe Blocking List or Blacklist, a DNSBL they once published to identify IPs sending mail to addresses known to have previously unsubscribed. Anyway, if, like me, you were wondering what has happened to Lashback lately — the answer is, they’re still out there, and they were just acquired by a company called PerformLine. Read more about that here, or head on over to Lashback’s website if you’re looking to learn more about what they do.
DELIVTERMS: The (almost) weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, the term and topic is CAN-SPAM.CAN-SPAM, aka “Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing (CAN-SPAM) Act of 2003” is the US federal anti-spam law. It doesn’t explicitly prohibit spam, but it applies various requirements to commercial email messages sent in the US, and it includes provisions that do help (in my opinion) to push email senders toward opt-in as a best practice.Here on Spam Resource you’ll find a whole section of articles relating to CAN-SPAM, including why you should adhere to the prior affirmative consent standard (because then you don’t have to label your email as an advertisement), what constitutes a transactional message under CAN-SPAM, and I’ll also help you break down four common CAN-SPAM myths. Here I’ll also include links to the full text of the law and the US Federal Trade Commission’s CAN-SPAM