Al Iverson
Hey! Simon Harper of SRH Design has a cool email newsletter you’ll want to sign up for, if you want to learn more about email marketing, Mailchimp and more. It’s called Mailchimp Mondays / Mail Mondays, and you can sign up here. He’s got WordPress Wednesday and Find-it Friday emails on offer, as well. Check ’em out!It’s always great to see other folks engaging in knowledge sharing to help spread marketing smarts and best practices far and wide! Thanks for that, Simon!
Your IP reputation is important. Your domain reputation is important. Your content is important, too.No, really.Well, okay. Of the three, content is third in the ranking. Sometimes a distant third. But it is on the list, and rightly so. Sometimes we here in deliverability land talk about how content doesn’t matter – but that’s not quite correct. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that we’re guilty of explaining things too simplistically. Reputation and deliverability success are MOSTLY driven by reputation and reputation is MOSTLY driven by (indirect ISP measures of) permission. Since ISP spam filters can’t really read permission directly, they rely on other signals to try to back into it. And content filtering is a tiny little part of that; trying to infer that a sender is bad because their mail includes content fingerprints or hallmarks that are often found in unsolicited and unwanted mail. Thus, content matters.Here’s…
This might be first in a weekly series on the topic of Deliverability Terminology. Let me know in email or in the comments if you find this useful — that’ll help guide my future efforts.In today’s Deliverability Terminology blog post, allow me to explain the Return-path address.This is also called the envelope sender address/domain, bounce address or domain, or the 5321 FROM or MFROM.What is it: Not to oversimplify it too much (hopefully), but email message have two from addresses. There’s what you normally think of as the from address – this is specified in the “from:” header in your email message and it shows up in your email client, webmail client or mobile email application. There’s also a second from address, called the return-path or envelope sender address. After selecting “view all headers” or raw email source, search for “return-path” to find this header and its contents.Mail servers transmit this…
Ugh, I hate that goofy stock photo. Needles make me itch. But it’s the best way to frame my concerns, I think. And I have concerns. Because domain reputation is a big deal of late. And I’m seeing people stumble into domain reputation issues — and not necessarily realize it — all because of domain sharing and shared reputation problems.Where? Mostly at Gmail. Domain reputation is definitely a big deal for the biggest mailbox provider, and that is Gmail. (If you’re a typical US B2C sender, the top three providers you’re sending to are going to be Gmail, Yahoo and Microsoft OLC/Outlook.com, in that order. Gmail’s going to be 60%+ of your list, probably.)A Gmail mail rejection (NDR/bounce) like this specifically talks about domain reputation:smtp;550 5.7.1 [x.xx.xx.xx] Our system has detected that this message is likely suspicious due to the very low reputation of the sending domain. To best protect our…
I’m not going to re-hash the whole discussion around should email senders be on dedicated IP or shared IPs, what’s best for deliverability, and all that jazz — it’s been done before (and in wonderful detail, by my Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz).But I did want to call out — in its own post — something that merits reinforcing:If you don’t send big volume, you probably shouldn’t be on dedicated sending IP addresses.What constitutes big volume? Ask ten different people and you’ll get five different answers. The most common guidance (and my guidance) is that you should be sending at least 100,000 email messages a month to keep a dedicated IP address “alive.” More is better, but if you don’t send anywhere near 100,000 messages per month, you’re likely to experience spam folder delivery at the big three (Microsoft, Yahoo and Gmail–ESPECIALLY Microsoft) just because you’re not sending enough volume…
Hey, *nix users! Did you know that you can send email using cURL? If you weren’t aware, cURL “is a computer software project providing a library (libcurl) and command-line tool (curl) for transferring data using various network protocols. The name stands for ‘Client URL’ (wikipedia).” It’s a very handy tool for those of us working in the email security, anti-spam or software-as-a-service space, allowing us to interact with web servers and services to download files and data. I use it quite a bit. But I had no idea that it can speak SMTP! It doesn’t look too difficult, either.Here’s how I tested it myself, composing the command thusly (ignore those goofy quotes at the start and end): curl –ssl-reqd –url ‘smtp://gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com:25’ –mail-from blarfengar@xnnd.com –mail-rcpt nugget@wombatmail.com –upload-file –
Here’s a quick and simple post where I take a moment to share with you the stats from my Spam Resource email newsletter sends — you might have already seen this in the CSA webinar I just did with Marcel Becker from Yahoo. But if not, here you go! As you can see courtesy of the pac-man-like thing above (please don’t sue me, whoever owns pac-man), just a hair under 18% of my tracked opens seem to fall into the Apple MPP category, based on the referrer. (I know that going off of referrer alone is slightly inaccurate, but that’s the easy way to do it and I’m lazy.) This “about 18%” number seems to be pretty static from week-to-week of late. The net here is that my data is a lot different than the data from Sparkpost and others. Their data isn’t wrong — indeed, Sparkpost’s data is a lot more…
Obtaining a VMC (Verified Mark Certificate) can be a hurdle for folks who want to implement a BIMI logo. You can proceed without it, but if you do, while your logo likely will show up in Yahoo Mail and Fastmail, but it isn’t going to show up in Gmail, as Google has made a VMC cert a requirement for their BIMI installation.If you don’t have a VMC today — here’s how you can work around that, and implement a BIMI-like sender logo display for Fastmail, Yahoo and Gmail.First, do set up a BIMI record, even though you don’t have a VMC. Here are logo requirements, and here’s what you need to setup the overall DNS record, including authentication-related prerequisites.That’ll cover you for Yahoo and Fastmail. Now, Gmail. Note that this Gmail workaround is NOT A BIMI LOGO — I don’t want anybody to get mad at me, thinking I’m trying…
Here’s your last chance to join me, Al Iverson, along with Marcel Becker from Yahoo, on Monday April 4th at 10:00 am US central time / 11:00 am US eastern time / 17:00 CET, in a webinar put together by the Certified Senders Alliance, where we’ll talk about domain reputation, authentication and deliverability, and the current state of open tracking thanks to Apple MPP. Register here!
Eliot Harper from CloudKettle has done an amazing thing: Tasked himself with understanding the different types of global unsubscribe handling in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud platform, and created this fantastic explanation of how these work and what Marketing Cloud users should expect as far as how these will impact who you can or cannot send email messages to via that platform. If you’re an SFMC user or consultant, you’ll know that this is a complex feature that can confuse folks easily. Eliot does a wonderful job of breaking it down and helping to make it easy to grasp. Great job, sir!