Spam Resource

Adam Silver silver is a “contract interaction designer with a strong technical background” and a savvy blogger, who just figured out something that I’ve known for a while: One-click unsub is a bad idea. I don’t fault him for being new to the party — you don’t know, until you know. And he frames the problem in a new context: links are for navigation, buttons are for actions. It’s a good way to look at it. Link to a form page, require a button push to unsubscribe, and thus, evade security link scanning that causes false positive unsubs.It seems so simple to me.

Today, let’s define the acronym BIMI, aka “Brand Indicators for Message Identification.”Let’s go straight to the folks who have created the BIMI specs, the Authindicators Working Group. From their website: “Brand Indicators for Message Identification is an emerging email specification that enables the use of brand-controlled logos within supporting email clients.”What? It’s a way to publish a logo that will show up next to email messages you send.Why? To increase branding, increase customer confidence that your emails are legitimate, and it can increase engagement.How? First, you must secure your domain with DMARC (and that DMARC policy must be a “strong” one, aka “quarantine” or “reject”). You must purchase a “verified mark certificate” (required by some BIMI-supporting mailbox providers, though not all) to prove that your logo is properly trademarked, and then you need to publish a version of your logo in a special limited vector graphics format. BIMI is supported by

Everybody’s all abuzz about the new Mac desktop-specific email client made just for Gmail. Various folks that have tried it seem to be raving about how great it is. I manage so many mailboxes that I don’t know that I want to get into an email client that supports on Gmail, but if you’re a heavy user of Gmail, and a Mac user, and want a better desktop mail client, maybe Mimestream is right for you. Here’s a review from The Verge.

Hey, I’ll be participating in the next Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) webinar, where I’ll be chatting with Sebastian Kluth (CSA) and Karsten Vendler (LEGO Group) about where DMARC and BIMI are today and where we think this is all headed. It’s sure to be a fun discussion and I’ll have some new data to share on DMARC and BIMI adoption. Please join us? It’s on June 1st at 10:00 am US central time and you can register for it here. I hope to see you there!* I also promise to annoy Karsten with many LEGO related questions, like, is it truly fun to work for LEGO? Do you get many free LEGO blocks? Will you get me some free LEGO blocks? And more.

Today’s guest post comes from Steven Lunniss, Deliverability Lead for Cordial. Steven is a seasoned email marketing expert with over 15 years of experience – including six years working with top email service providers as well as nine years client-side.The goal of sunsetting is to focus your resources on engaged subscribers and maintain a healthy email list. As part of a “subscriber lifecycle strategy” methodology, it helps to boost deliverability success (and inbox placement) by boosting your engagement metrics. You’re boosting those engagement metrics by suppressing subscribers who aren’t engaging.It’s important to strike a balance between re-engagement efforts and the need to remove those unresponsive subscribers – you want to maximize engagement but not at the cost of throwing away live subscribers.How to properly sunset your inactive subscribers:Define Inactivity Criteria: Determine what qualifies as “inactivity” for your specific business. It could be a certain period of time (e.g., six months)

Twilio Sendgrid’s Denis O’Sullivan recently put together this great Q&A With Alex Brotman from Comcast, and it provides stellar insight for senders. No secret sauce will be leaked here today, but there’s great knowledge here to help people sending emails understand what’s going on and what to do to prevent and/or handle various problems. Thanks to Alex, and thanks to Denis!

Multiple folks have reported via multiple forums today (May 22nd) that Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop (called the “Complaint Feedback Loop/CFL”) may not be working properly at the moment. People are reporting either no volume at all for the past few days or greatly reduced volume of spam complaint reports. I am reliably informed that Yahoo is aware of the issue and is working on fixing things. I’ll update this post when I have more information.

There are enough BIMI questions floating out there nowadays, that I thought it’d be good timing to put together a BIMI mini-FAQ. If you did not already know, BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification) is a way to attach a logo to your email sending domain and with recent Gmail developments (not to mention, Apple support), it’s poised to become rather a big thing. And assuming you did know what BIMI was, let’s jump right into the FAQ:What’s that new blue checkmark thing at Gmail? How do I get that?Gmail recently announced that for senders who implement BIMI, they’ll show a little blue checkmark next to the sender’s email address, showing that the sender has been validated. You’ll get that by implementing BIMI (with a VMC). Read more about that here.What’s a VMC again and where do I get one of those?VMC means “Verified Mark Certificate” and it’s a certification you

For my Friday fun post today, I’m sharing with you a Wisconsin Public Radio story featuring an interview with my friend Wendy Wimmer, talking about her family and history and her wonderful new debut short-story collection, “Entry Level.” It starts with a bit of a “cubical life” sensitivity, and takes a turn into the fantastic. Check it out! And then go buy the book.My favorite quote from the interview: “The story ended before the talking marine animals showed up.”

So you’ve seen a new bounce message and you’re wondering how best to handle it. Where do you start? How do you troubleshoot it? I’d love to write a whole book on the topic, but alas, that’ll take some time. In the meantime, here’s what to do:Here’s the very short and abbreviated version of what you should do:READ THE BOUNCE MESSAGE. It’ll contain text. That text will almost always contain an English language description of why the ISP rejected the email message. That message may be cryptic, but it’s VERY insightful, if you can decode it.Trust the bounce message. Bounce messages should be considered correct until proven otherwise. For example: if you get a bounce message from Gmail that says your mail is bouncing because of a lack of email authentication — lean hard into that. Investigate. Test. Prove that authentication is working. Because it’s probably not. Yes, sometimes an ISP