friendly from
When we’re looking at the technical details of email addresses there are two quite different contexts we talk about. One is an “821 address” or “5321 address”. This is the email address as it’s used by the SMTP protocol, as part of the “MAIL FROM: ” or “RCPT TO: ” commands sent to the mailserver. It’s defined in RFC 821, now updated by RFC 5321, hence the name. If someone mentions the “envelope” or they’re talking about “bounce addresses”, this is the sort they mean. We’re not talking about them in this post. The other is an “822 address” or a “5322 address’. They’re the ones the recipient sees in the To: or From: headers. They’re named after their RFC, RFC 5322. This is the sort of email address most folks mean by default, unless they’re explicitly talking about the envelope of an email, but if someone describes an email
This is one of those things that a client learned about the hard way, so I wanted to share with you all with the hope that you can avoid some of the same pain that they, and I, experienced, while helping them troubleshoot this issue.Avoid including emojis in the friendly from field.The friendly from is not exactly a header, but it’s part of the from header, the text that goes along with your from email address. (Learn more about what it the friendly from is here.) People love to customize the friendly from to various ends: it could be an effort to drive better recognition of their brand, it could be to suggest a personal connection between sender and recipient, or it could be something done to help drive more sales. Or maybe sometimes you might even modify it just to look cool. That’s okay; we’ve all done it.But what you
I’ve blogged about the Friendly From before, just basically so (and you can find that here), but now, Jennifer Nespola Lantz takes it to the next level. Over at the Kickbox blog, she dives deep into how the Friendly From can impact deliverability success, guiding you through what you need to consider from a deliverability perspective when it comes to branding your from address. This is valuable insight. Click on through to check it out.
DELIVTERMS: The weekly series here on Spam Resource that defines deliverability terminology. Today, I’m going to talk about the Friendly From.What is the friendly from? It’s not quite its own separate header, but it is a field in your from header. It is the text that goes next to your email address in the from header.If the from address header in my email looks like this:From: Al Iverson That means that the from address is aiversontestmail@wombatmail.com and the “friendly from” is “Al Iverson.”Some systems enclose the friendly from in quotes, like this:From: “Al Iverson, not a lawyer” This helps prevent formatting glitches in some cases, like if you include a comma in your friendly from. In that case, if you don’t put the whole thing in quotes, there’s a good chance recipients could end up with a very funky looking from address, depending on how their mail application or webmail…
