Spam Resource

Google first warned earlier this year that they’re going to retire accounts that haven’t been accessed at all in the past two years. This affects Gmail accounts — if nobody’s home, no emails have been read, nothing’s going on, Google is now likely to shut down that account. They warned us that the soonest they would start shutting down accounts is December 2023. Well, December is now here. What should we do about it? If you’re a Google user and don’t want to lose that Gmail account, or lose any other data that may be associated with your Google account (files, photos, etc.), Google explained in a recent notification what you can do to make sure that Google continues to denote your account as active. In short? Log in, poke at something. Reply to an email. Edit a file. Show a sign of life. If you’re an email newsletter or email

Hey, people were freaking out five years ago about how Mailchimp was for sure going to shut down email newsletter service TinyLetter. It turns out that the concern was prescient, though just a bit premature. Here we are, five years later, and now Mailchimp has just announced that it is shutting down TinyLetter at the end of February, 2024.  Mailchimp sent the following announcement to TinyLetter users on Wednesday, November 29th: In 2011, Mailchimp acquired a small newsletter service called TinyLetter to expand our offerings and make it easy for people to send updates, digests, and dispatches to their fans and friends. Over the years, TinyLetter took on a life of its own, and we’ve loved watching you share your work and build communities around your newsletters. Since then, our business priorities have evolved, and we’ve been laser focused on building tools to serve marketers and help small businesses grow.

American broadband communications provider Sparklight, aka Cable One, provides service to 1.1 million residential and business customers across 24 states. However, as of July 14, 2022, they no longer provide email service to residential customers. The affected domains are: cableone.net newwavecom.net nwcable.net mycitycable.com Consider them all dead; the MX for these domains is no longer answering on port 25. [ H/T: Evan Burke. ]

Gmail has very recently unveiled a series of new deferral/rejection messages. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with the following Gmail rejection messages: 421 4.7.28 Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail containing one of your URL domains. To protect our users from spam, mail with the URL has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError  to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your SPF domain. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your domain has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit  https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError  to review our

What do you do when you’re a newsletter publisher or marketing manager sending emails to your list and you run into deliverability trouble through no fault of your own? How do you even know? It’s a tricky and sticky situation and I’ve seen it happen more than once lately, and across more than one email service provider (ESP). The assumption, most of the time, is that if a mailbox provider — say, Gmail, decides to put your mail in the spam folder, that it’s a reflection of the quality of your mail — not a reflection of the provider or any issue the provider might be having. Ninety-seven percent of the time, it’s all about the (sending) client, not the sending platform. But sometimes it is actually a problem related to the sending platform. And that’s not an easy thing to measure. But it’s a good thing to ask your

I’m not big on holidays but I will use this as an excuse to say THANK YOU to everyone who has written to me with positive feedback, kind words, job leads, consulting opportunities, chances to chat, and more. I really do appreciate you and it speaks well to what a great community of people I am lucky to be a part of. Thank you again and have a happy and safe holiday (and successful BFCM launches).

Today’s guest post is comes courtesy of Compliance and Deliverability Enablement expert Alison Gootee, who reminds us of the reason for the (email) season. Take it away, Alison! In the USA, at least, this week is widely considered to be a springboard to the year-end holiday season. Retailers will be hustling to meet or exceed their projected revenue goals while, conveniently, many of their customers will begin their pursuit of the perfect gifts for their family and friends (and coworkers, and mail carriers, and refuse collectors, and kids’ teachers, and maaaaybe a little something for themselves, too). The convergence of retailers’ and consumers’ goals means that inboxes will soon be more stuffed than a Thanksgiving turkey (or a Thanksgiving Ali(ver)son for that matter). If your open rates decline over the next couple of weeks, don’t panic! In addition to the increased inbox competition, plenty of people will also be busy with

There’s no two ways about it — it truly is getting trickier to deliver email to Gmail lately. There’s a lot going on here — from the recent past, to what’s happening today, through to the very near future. Let me jump right into it, starting with changes that are more likely to affect ESP/CRM customers, marketing senders and newsletter publishers. Get ready: the bounce apocalypse is coming. Google warned us in mid-2023 that they will now begin to disable and delete Google accounts (including Gmail accounts) after two years of inactivity. This starts December 1, 2023. Your bounce rates are likely to go up. Don’t fret — these truly are invalid, abandoned addresses. Suppressing these addresses when they bounce helps you reduce useless sending effort. There truly was nobody home. Learn more on this “digital wake up call” from fellow deliverability expert Matthew Vernhout here. “Over quota” and “out

Preparation for the holiday send season — is it too late? Yeah, might be. BFCM is upon us. It’s too late to warm new IP addresses or domains, for example. However, there is one simple trick you can still implement, even now, to help deliver mail better (and possibly faster) during this peak season. Consider this: Almost everybody times their campaign launches to go out at the top of the hour, or the bottom of the hour. Exactly. Think a 6:00 am launch or a 9:30 am launch. On the hour, or on the half hour. Because everybody does it that way, mailbox providers are besieged with an onslaught of email messages, all at once, at zero minutes, and thirty minutes, past almost every hour. Which means that this can make it hard for everybody’s mail to get through the door, and it could even end up causing email processing

Lo! A different guy just popped up in my Linkedin feed to say that cold leads are cool, because they’re not illegal. (I’ve heard it before.) And for a bonus, he wants to argue about whether or not cold lead emails truly are “spam” — he says no. That’s fine, everybody’s free to have their own take, but if you’re loading my email address into an automation tool to send me an email, and I didn’t give affirmative consent to indicate my desire to receive that email, it’s spam. The law literally says that you have to label your mail as an unsolicited advertisement if you don’t have that consent. It’s not new, it’s not groundbreaking, it’s just the basic tenet of permission marketing via email. But, fine. “That’s my opinion,” even though it’s what the law says. And it’s not “just” my opinion. I think it’s observably unwanted and