industry
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…
Kickbox interviewed a bunch of us to find out what methods of opt-in we recommend. Go check it out. What’s your favourite method of opt-in?
That was a longer than intended hiatus from blogging. I’ll be honest, though, talking about email just seemed so trivial in the face of what was and is continuing to happen. I posted this over on slack, earlier, and Steve pointed out I should make it public on the blog. It’s as good a way as any to come back to the blog. With everything going on in the US, people are applying the brakes to some types of content and speech. These are not, at the moment, going to be nuanced or careful. They’re trying to stop violence, insurrection and sedition. This is potentially a place of ‘block it all and we’ll sort it out later’ I think folks should expect filters to tighten down on content – particularly political content – in the next few days and lasting for at least a few weeks. I don’t think this…
At tomorrow’s #ltdelivery session we’ll continue talking about session: Maintaining and warming up reputations. Invitations are going out end of the day (Dublin) today. Want to join dozens of your colleagues talking about Reputation? Sign up on our #ltdelivery page.