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Jennifer Nespola Lantz’s recent post about Gmail potentially offering political senders a fast pass method to the inbox has gotten me thinking about the spam fight we went through back in the olden times. Before CAN-SPAM, domain reputation and deliverability best practices. There was a time back in those bad old days when the marketing industry mega-group Direct Marketing Association tried to convince the world that opt-out was the best path for email marketing. The arguments as to why this absolutely horseshit plan was supposed to be okay varied; free speech, growth of the economy, support for small businesses, whatever. Everybody should be allowed the chance to hit your inbox at least once, they said; and then you could just tell the sender; each sender, individually, to stop emailing you. They loved touting two things. First was an “opt-out registry” service called e-MPS. Smart netizens knew that allowing this to proceed would
Today’s guest post comes from my colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, VP of Industry Relations and Deliverability at Kickbox, keeping us updated on a potentially upcoming Gmail spam filtering process change that is likely to have a great impact upon all of us. Take it away, Jen!On June 28th, I saw a news article by Axios reporting that “Google moves to keep campaign messages out of spam.” At first glance I was very surprised about the statement knowing all Gmail does to protect users and how hands off they tend to be (outside of the machines doing their magic.) What I originally defined as campaign messages was coming from a too in-the-weeds mental dictionary about email production. I always coined campaigns as a singular email marketing effort. And then I read it…”Google has asked the Federal Election Commission to green light a program that could keep campaign emails from ending up
It’s time for another BIMI update, and this time it’s chock full of new details that you’ll want to know! So let’s get right to it.The Authindicators Working Group (the folks behind the BIMI spec) have just indicated that Apple plans BIMI support! The information published so far suggests that it’s coming this fall to both iOS and MacOS. Beyond that, details are light; so don’t ask me (or them) for greater definition just yet. I’m sure when they have details, they will share. And when they share, I will share.Where does that leave us today? Here’s your status update on ISP support for BIMI as of June, 2022.Yes: Which ISPs/MBPs/email applications support BIMI today or plan to support it in the near future: Apple (iOS and MacOS email clients), Fastmail, Gmail, and Yahoo Mail. (This also includes Pobox, AOL/Netscape, and Google for Business)Perhaps: Which ISPs are currently considering BIMI support:
Here’s what is sure to be your favorite fun factoid forever from today: At Gmail — for the domains gmail.com and googlemail.com — whether or not the username portion has dots in it is irrelevant. If you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@gmail.com and aliversonmailbox@gmail.com, you’re sending mail to the same person, the same account, twice. Don’t take my word for it — here’s the Google help page with details.As Google indicates, this does not apply to Google for Business, aka G-Suite addresses. So if you send mail to al.iverson.mailbox@wombatmail.com and aliversonmailbox@wombatmail.com, those are indeed two separate addresses.The Gmail “dot thing” is sometimes a huge pain in the rear for senders. If you can work it into your registration forms, you could try normalizing Gmail addresses by removing the dots, to prevent duplicate submissions. Or disallowing dots in the username, if the domain is gmail.com or googlemail.com. However, even this is a bit…
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 an updated version of a post from way back in 2018, with additional resources! I hope you find it handy.)Need a tool to parse message headers? Trying to break down how long it took to hand off an email message between servers? Want to check for blocklistings, content scoring or link issues? Here’s a few different tools that do a few different things.First, let’s check message headers using this tool from Google, or this (I think unofficial) version for Microsoft headers. Both do basically the same thing — you paste in the email headers and it will parse them, giving you a breakdown of how much time it took between each server hop. Very handy for troubleshooting delivery delays. Did a Gmail server hold on to your message for four hours before passing it on? Or did it never leave your ESP’s mail server? That’s what tools like these…
I was talking to friends running an ESP platform the other day, helping them understand the difference between the available types of list unsubscribe headers, what does it all mean and how does it all work. Might you find that interesting as well? Let’s see.List-unsubscribe: What is it? It’s a hidden email header. Originally specified in RFC 2369, the goal was to provide a hook that email clients could use to display an unsubscribe option to subscribers in a method and location that was easy to find and common from message to message. I can’t speak for the creators, but I imagine the goal is to make it easy for subscribers to unsubscribe, so that they don’t turn to clicking the “report spam” button instead, out of frustration. TL;DR? It’s basically a declaration of how a standardized “Unsubscribe” button in an email client should work.It’s been around a while (the spec…
It’s time for your periodic BIMI adoption status update. A quick overview of what this is all about: BIMI is a standard being adopted by multiple internet services providers (ISPs) to allow the display of a sender’s logo along side email messages, when displayed on a mobile device or in a webmail client. Some ISPs and mail clients have had a sender logo display function for a while now (one example is Gravatar), but BIMI is an attempt to standardize and regulate this mechanism across the email ecosystem.Adoption by senders seems a bit slow; but the spec only went public in 2019, which isn’t that long ago. Also, it suffers a bit from the “chicken and egg” problem — it’s hard to convince senders to adopt the standard if receivers haven’t adopted support for the standard. But now with two of the top three B2C mailbox providers (Yahoo and Gmail) having BIMI support, I’m…
Message “clipping” at Gmail is when your email message is so large that Gmail won’t display the whole thing on one page. It’ll show part of the message, then it’ll be cut off, saying “[Message clipped]” and giving you an opportunity to click to view the whole email message in another window or tab. (You can see a screen shot of that above.)This can be sub-optimal for senders, because this amounts to an email message with sections both “above the fold” and “below the fold” — meaning that first bits of the content will display in the inbox upon initial view, and the second bits of the content won’t display until the user tells Gmail to display it all by way of clicking in the appropriate place.In my initial research on this topic, I found that everybody in the world advertises 102KB as the HTML limit before you hit the…
Have you been running frequent campaigns and noticed that your email metrics have suddenly dropped? Chances are that your emails are being blocked by Gmail or being sent to the spam folder, disabling you from messaging Gmail users. But why is Gmail blocking your mail server if you’ve been following email deliverability best practices and the bulk sender guidelines? How do I Stop Gmail Blocking Emails? Being the world’s biggest email service provider with over 1.8 billion Gmail users can sometimes result in emails being miscategorized as unsolicited mail. However, there are a few reasons why Gmail blocks emails or sends them to the spam folder. Here are a couple of things you can do to ensure your emails make it to your Gmail subscribers. Implement Email AuthenticationReduce Gmail Spam ReportsClean Your Email ListCheck Your DMARC ReportsRequest Removal from Gmail’s Blacklist Include your Server’s IP Address in your Email Authentication…