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A few months ago, Google made a splash in the political press and the email marketing space when they asked the FEC the following question: May Google launch a free and non-partisan pilot program to test Gmail design features, which will be open to authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership political action committees, where spam detection as applied to messages from a pilot participant on direct feedback from the recipient rather than standard spam detection, and each pilot participant will receive information regarding the rate of emails delivered into Gmail users’ inboxes, as long as the pilot will rely predominantly participant is in compliance with the program’s requirements?Google’s letter to the FEC (.pdf link) The letter is actually worth a read as many of the general press reports about the request focused on Google asking the FEC to allow politicians to spam freely. I mostly avoided discussions about

Dear Colleagues at ESPs, We have a problem. More specifically, YOU have a problem. You have a spam problem. One that you’re not taking care of in any way, shape or form. There was a point where ESPs started caring about spam out of their networks. They got blocked enough they had to take action. Because they took action a lot of the big blocklists started being nice. Spamhaus, for instance, would do ‘informational’ listings so that ESPs could fix things rather than going to a direct block. This led management at ESPs to start to think they had this spam thing under control. They stopped worrying too much about spam and compliance. I mean, to management the whole point of having a compliance desk is to stop the blocks. No blocks mean no problems with spam out of the network, right? As someone who gets a lot of B2B

I started out with the best intentions to get back into the swing of things with blogging more regularly. But between MAAWG recovery, COVID recovery and life it’s not worked out that way. This is an excerpt of something I wrote over on slack to explain why someone was still struggling with delivery even though best practices weren’t working. Hope it will be helpful for some folks. (and now I’m off to my next call…) When the issue is a mailstream that has problems that aren’t being addressed by common best practices. In order to address that we need to understand more about why the common best practices aren’t working. They may not be zebras, but they might be donkeys. So I started with listing “these are the problems I’ve seen with mailstreams of your type and why those problems aren’t being resolved by the normal practices.” Email delivery really

It’s been a few years since we’ve actually made it to a MAAWG. We missed much of 2018 and 2019 due to our international move. Then 2020 San Francisco conflicted with a personal engagement. Then, well, pandemic hit and it’s been virtual and then we were moving and … wow, it’s been busy! We did make it to London, though, and have started reconnecting with colleagues new and old. We also got a chance to take a trip down the river over the weekend leading to a chance to get some pretty pictures. Blues and Whites Tower Bridge south tower. Look, Kids! Big Ben! London old and new After a day of touristing, we’re now buckling down to do some hard work. Steve’s doing a training session this afternoon and I’m moderating a panel tomorrow. I’m so excited to be back in person learning from my colleagues. Don’t forget to

I don’t send a lot of spam complaints generally. Mostly I block and move on. There are some companies, though, that I offer the professional courtesy of sending a complaint or a report to their abuse@ address. Former clients, friends and colleagues generally get that courtesy. The number of ESPs that completely fail to take any action is disappointing. Too many of them can’t even manage the simple courtesy of removing addresses. A few don’t even process bounces correctly and continue to send mail even when getting a spam block or 550 user unknown. Sometimes I’ll reach out to folks who I know work at particular ESPs, although that’s less common these days as everyone seems to be moving companies and I can’t keep track. Often I get an invite to “always send me complaints directly.” That … is not a solution, people. Expecting people who are reporting spam to…

Every once in a while we’ll see a rejection from Yahoo that says RFCs 554 5.0.0 Message not accepted due to failed RFC compliance. What does that mean and what can we do about it? It really does mean exactly what it says on the label: there’s something about the message that is not in compliance with any number of RFCs and are not going to accept the message in its current state. When trying to help a colleague diagnose the issue I came up with a list of things to check. Troubleshooting in the email Is there any high ASCII without quoted printable or Base64 encoding in the body or the headers?Is there a Date header? Is there any duplication in header fields?Is there a bare IP address in a link somewhere?Are the line lengths inside the message shorter than 998 characters?Are lines correctly terminated with CR/LF?Is the DKIM…

While all the talk of what’s slick and hot and next seems to focus on adding AI to this and building the blockchain version of that, it still sounds to me like email is where the money is. Am I crazy to think that? And of course, multi-channel matters, but that means having a strong email service as one of those channels, no? I think Sinch would agree.Perhaps known to most as an SMS aggregator, Stockholm, Sweden-based Sinch has decided to dive headfirst into email, having, “signed a definitive deal to acquire Pathwire, the cloud-based email provider behind Mailgun, Mailjet and Email on Acid.” Read all about it over on TechCrunch.Pathwire only recently acquired Email on Acid back in June.

A while back I wrote about Apple Mail Privacy Protection, what it does and how it works. Since MPP was first announced I’d assumed that it would be built on the same infrastructure as iCloud Private Relay, Apple’s VPN product, but hadn’t seen anything from Apple to explicitly connect the two and didn’t have access to enough data to confirm it independently. But the nice folks at MailChimp did gather enough image load data to confirm that the two are related, and prompted me to look into Private Relay a bit more. Apple have a nice description of Private Relay from the consumer perspective in their support pages, but the interesting bits are in their technical info for network admins. Their description there matches my black box testing of MPP image loads exactly, but the bit that clinches it is the directions for how enterprise networks can block private relay…

You’ve probably heard about Apple Mail Privacy Protection. Email marketing chat has been all a-twitter about it since it was announced in June. Skipping over all the “Openpocalypse” panic, what is it and what does it do? Image Loads It’s all about images in email and how they’re loaded (particularly invisible one pixel images that are used solely for tracking). Why do we care about image loads? Email marketers and ESPs have used the metadata included with image loads for years to grab information and metrics from their recipients. By using a unique name for an image they can tell when a particular recipient loads that image. That image load correlated with a particular recipient is what ESPs describe as “an Open”, and it means that means the sender knows the recipient read the email. They’ll often use an invisible, single pixel image that can be easily added to every…

A lot of folks are talking about Apple’s recent announcement about building privacy protection into email. I have somewhat stayed out of the conversation and I’m not sure what I really think about it. This is a change to how a lot of folks use email and no one really likes change. I actually have a post I’ve been quietly working on talking about open rates. From my perspective, they’re an increasingly useless metric for deliverability and too many senders put too much emphasis on them and they’re not telling us what we think they’re telling us. I might work a little bit more on that, but at this point it kinda feels moot given Apple’s new announcement. I do have some thoughts and opinions on the Apple change but I’m still thinking about it and looking at the longer term implications. I know there’s a rush to be the…