best practices
Just a very, very short post with links to the Yahoo and Google requirements FAQs. Given I can’t ever remember them I’m guessing lots of y’all can’t either. Yahoo: https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/ Google: https://support.google.com/a/answer/14229414
Happy 2024, everyone! We’ve released a shiny new tool to let folks self-check a lot of common questions we see about email requirements. Go to AboutMy.email and send an email to the email address it gives you. Once it receives that email it will go through it and do many of the basic checks we’d usually do to check the technical health of a client’s email1 and displays a detailed report of what it finds. Details it reports on include SPF DKIM DMARC BIMI, including details about the certificate and image What IP address it was sent from, and whether it has valid DNS The size of the mail as sent (no more arguments about Gmail clipping size) The SMTP session as it was delivered The raw payload of the mail as delivered Checks for line length, non-ascii characters, non-CRLF line endings Headers, both pretty (including RFC 2047 decoded) and
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
Meanwhile… I apparently gave chess.com an email address in 2007 – probably due to a client engagement? I don’t know. I unsubscribed from their mail at some point as there has only been one email from them between 2010 and 2021. Maybe this time they’ll actually unsubscribe me.
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
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
TrueAccord’s Josie Garcia is a good friend and very savvy deliverability wizard who has helped many senders address inbox woes and data hygiene issues throughout her career. Currently she’s helping a debt collector improve their sending practices — very much a challenging industry from a deliverability perspective. When she told me of her recent successes, I asked her if she would be kind enough to put something together to share with the world, and she was kind enough to do so, leading to today’s post. Take it away, Josie. When a sender’s email program assigns different engagement levels to groups based on specific criteria, naturally, some groups will perform better than others. This can, at times, be challenging. Adding to the challenges, Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented stricter requirements for bulk senders, set to be enforced in 2024. If you use Gmail Postmaster Tools, and one of your domains
Since I wrote about it last month the requirements for bulk senders to Yahoo and Google have changed a little. The big change is that bulk senders need to authenticate with both SPF and DKIM, rather than SPF or DKIM. Only one of those has to align with the 822 From: header.
Lots and lots of holidays, events and special days are approaching. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Small business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. Christmas. Kwanzaa. Hanukkah. (And more!) And for each of these, somebody somewhere wants to send an email about it, probably to sell something. This is the busy season. This fourth quarter of the year is prime time for email marketing efforts. Everybody is ramping up. Inboxes are more full than at other times of the year, because so many folks send as much as they can, looking for as much of that email-related revenue as possible. This brings the question: how does one prepare for deliverability success during this time? My colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, along with Gene Gusman from Zeta, recently presented a free webinar on this topic (good stuff – check it out!) and I though it would be good to add my own two cents. The
What’s CC and BCC in email? And which one should you use? Here’s everything you need to know to use CC and BCC like a pro. The post CC and BCC in Emails: How to Use Both Like a Pro appeared first on SendGrid.