Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability
I'm Al Iverson and I'm here to help. Got questions about email deliverability? You’ve come to the right place! For 25 years, I’ve been writing about email technology, sender requirements, authentication, spam prevention, and deliverability best practices. With over 2,000 articles in the archives, there’s plenty to explore. Can't find what you're looking for? Drop me a line with your question and I'll do my best to follow up. And don't forget to subscribe to the email newsletter to get fresh deliverability insights delivered straight to your inbox every week or two.
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GPT: V1 Retirement and Important Updates

GPT: V1 Retirement and Important Updates

Things are happening in the world of Google Postmaster Tools. If you’re a long time user of Google’s sender reputation dashboard known as Google Postmaster Tools ( what is that? ), you may have already seen the warning: As of October 31, the legacy version of Google Postmaster Tools (V1) is being retired, a banner warned us across the top of our GPT dashboard. Well, that October 31 date was October 31, 2025 – at this point, many months ago. For a time, Google had put that retirement on pause , as a k…

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GPT: V1 Retirement and Important Updates

Things are happening in the world of Google Postmaster Tools. If you’re a long time user of Google’s sender reputation dashboard known as Google Postmaster Tools ( what is that? ), you may have already seen the warning: As of October 31, the legacy version of Google Postmaster …

Ask Al: How do you actually set up a BIMI logo?

In previous videos, I’ve talked a lot about BIMI sender logos, often in the abstract. Many people do seem to understand what a BIMI logo is, by now. All well and good, but I did recently have somebody ask me, okay, well, I think I kind of get it, but how do you actually DO it. …

Email Isn't Dead, and Neither Is This Blog: Spam Resource at 25

When I published my very first post back in August 2001, I never envisioned that I'd still be sitting at a keyboard twenty-five years later talking about email deliverability. A quarter of a century. Twenty of those on Google's Blogger platform. That is an internet eter…

No Reply, Not Your Domain? Yes, Problem

As reported by Ars Technica , security researcher Cory Solovewicz owns the domains noreply.net and noreply.us. Every day, he sees nearly 700 inbound email attempts to addresses on those domains. That is a massive amount of misdirected mail, and it's leaking personally ident…

Fun with data: Progressive sender list breakdown

Here's a quick data snapshot that a friend was kind enough to share. The friend manages a smaller progressive sender email list, and he brought this out when we happened to be chatting about the new APRF feedback standard . Right now, Comcast is the only provider offering u…

Lukas Lunow: Why Does Microsoft Trash My Emails?

If you're living in the land of Salesforce Marketing Cloud and struggling when it comes to getting your emails reliably delivered to Microsoft inboxes, then this guide is for you. A longtime Salesforce consultant (and previously an expert solutions consultant for the Salesf…

You should hire: Jennifer Nespola Lantz

My friend, expert deliverability consultant, Jennifer Nespola Lantz , recently posted to Linkedin that the broad layoffs happening in tech right now have reached her. In her post , she writes: Hello everyone! I'm looking for work. Full-time, contract, consulting, and so on!…

Physician, heal thyself: Even I can get auth wrong!

Here is a fresh slice of humble pie: even after years of advising senders on authentication protocols and email best practices, I managed to break my own newsletter's SPF record last week. I try to practice what I preach. My newsletter list is 100% double opt-in, no spam he…

BIMI: What does self-asserted mean?

What does it mean when people talk about a "self-asserted" BIMI logo, and should you set one up? That's the topic of my latest Valimail "Ask Al" video. A standard BIMI record does two things. It publishes a link to an SVG file, which is the logo you wan…

The Context Box: Do It, But Right

Newsletter strategist Dylan Redekop recently wrote about the "context box, " his term for the line in a marketing or newsletter email explaining why you are receiving a particular message. (By the way, I think he coined something useful here, so I'm totally going …

Troubleshooting 554 5.7.5 DMARC-related SMTP rejections

It's a bit of a cryptic error message, isn't it? Mail bouncing back with "554 5.7.5 Permanent error evaluating DMARC policy." Wondering how to troubleshoot that? Well, I covered exactly this in a recent Ask Al video for Valimail, which was inspired by this Red…

Webinar Alert: From DKIM to DKIM2: What Senders Need to Know Now and What Mailbox Providers Expect

Hey, big senders! Are you unsure about DKIM2 and wondering what you need to know about it? If so, the Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) has got you covered, with a free webinar on this very topic upcoming on Tuesday, August 25th at 9:00 AM US Central Time. Presented by Sebast…

Guest Post: The Race to the Bottom Runs Straight Past the Inbox

Editor's note: Today I've invited a contribution from Jakub Olexa, CEO of Mailkit and Omnivery . Jakub's a good guy, part of the collaborative spirit that works together to protect the email ecosystem from within, and I was curious about and intrigued by what he…

APRF: A New Standard for Deliverability Feedback

There's a very exciting new proposed email specification making its way through the IETF, called APRF (Aggregate Performance Reporting). The individual draft specification comes from Alex Brotman of Comcast, Tom Corbett of Iterable, and Emil Gustafsson of Google. And Comcas…

What If? The Future of AOL Mail Under Bending Spoons

Last October, Yahoo sold AOL to the Italian company Bending Spoons for approximately $1.5 billion (as reported by Forbes and others). If you're asking yourself, " What is Bending Spoons? " you aren't alone. They are a tech company known for acquiring well-kno…

Email-to-SMS no more?

Email-to-SMS gateways were once a popular tool for email geeks and savvy sysadmins to ping themselves with important notifications. Nowadays? They're either dead and gone, in the process of shutting down, or problematic enough that we can't even tell if they're stil…

Friday Fun: The Fascinating Story of Hotmail

Looking for a fun way to kill some time before you wrap it up ahead of the weekend? This might help. This YouTube video dives into the history of Hotmail, from how Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith came up with the idea for free webmail, to its explosive viral growth, and ultimatel…

Infobip Acquires SocketLabs

In the latest round of email industry consolidation, cloud communications giant Infobip has announced its acquisition of email marketing and infrastructure platform SocketLabs . Infobip is a global cloud communications platform focused primarily on SMS-based communication. The…

How does a mailbox provider support and display BIMI logos?

If you’re wondering exactly how a mailbox provider like Yahoo, Google, Comcast or Fastmail might implement support for decoding and displaying BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) logos in or near the inbox, then I’ve got you covered. TL;DR? It boils down to: Valid…