Yeah, I guess that's about right. Source: Twitter/X/Whatever it's called today .
On April 4, 2022, the Certified Senders Alliance invited Yahoo's Marcel Becker and yours truly (Al Iverson) of Spam Resource to "embark upon a discussion of domain reputation" where we also talk in length about open tracking, how it wasn't that accurate to beg…
Andrew Kordek and I go way back -- he, at Groupon, and me, at ExactTarget, working together (indeed sometimes out of that same Groupon office in Chicago) to help manage, monitor and mitigate deliverability issues for the world's number one daily deal site. Scale was not the…
I've got some important info for you today (and a reminder of two free webinars; one recorded, one upcoming and live) related to all of this. First, Yahoo and Google are both indicating that the compliance deadlines for their upcoming new sender requirements are changing. …
Roger Ebert, in addition to having been one of the best movie reviewers out there, is known to me, and to many other spam fighters out there, for having coined " The Boulder Pledge " way back in 1996. The Boulder Pledge is as follows: "Under no circumstances wi…
Google says all senders (of a certain size) must have a DMARC record in place as of February, 2024, else you could find yourself blocked at Gmail. Yahoo Mail is similarly requiring DMARC. And if you're not familiar with DMARC, where do you start? Where do you learn more and…
Bounce message. SMTP rejection. Deferral message. Non-delivery report (NDR). 5xx error. 4xx error. No matter what you call them, there are a zillion different kinds of them out there. Heck, Microsoft's got at least four different ways to tell you "user unknown ."…
I have a gift for you this holiday season: A bonus mini-webinar, covering a topic that people keep asking me about: The List Unsubscribe header, and specifically, how does it work and what do platforms need to implement to be in compliance with the new 2024 Gmail and Yahoo send…
Why don't ESPs warn you, when you're putting your email together, when you're about to send the test message, if DMARC is going to fail? It was perhaps considered optional in the past, but from 2024 onward, DMARC effectively becomes mandatory given Gmail and Yahoo&…
Validity (and before that, Return Path) has long offered access to various bits of reputation data to email users via DNS, primarily utilized via a particular SpamAssassin plugin . Checks include whether or not an IP address is on the Validity Certification whitelist, on the &…
Wondering what the different restrictions and limits are on the free tier level available from various SMB-focused email service providers (ESPs) and newsletter tools? I was, too! Thankfully, "Intentionally simple email marketing and automation platform" Smaily put to…
Brian Krebs has a grand writeup on the new ICANN thingy (technical term) meant to help folks standardize requests for access to WHOIS data via a new "Registration Data Request Service" process. I'll let Brian give you his good overview and history of what happene…
Sometimes I've got big data to share, and sometimes I don't. Since I don't have big data today, I thought it would be fun to pause and take a look at a small bit-o-data to see what we all can learn from it. In the graphic above, you can see a breakdown of the top do…
Wow! This is pretty cool. Ron Amadeo from ARS Technica r eports on a significant, AI-based spam filter update at Gmail . Gmail can now understand "adversarial text manipulations" using a new mechanism called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer), meaning…
GPT -- Google Postmaster Tools (or Gmail Postmaster Tools) is a truly handy thing for email senders, especially email marketers who need data and deliverability monitoring. It is a reputation dashboard that pulls together IP address reputation, domain reputation, bounce and co…
Did you know? You can sign up for a free att.net email account right this very second! And it'll cost you nothing at all! I signed up for one myself, and it was a perfectly fine and easy process. Why would you want to do this? AT&T makes note of, the mailbox comes "…
Just a quick post for today, with a couple of random bits of Salesforce Marketing Cloud (aka ExactTarget) info. These have been sitting in my notes for a while, and since I've got nothing else Marketing Cloud related to share right now, I figured I'd wrap them up into t…
From 1997-2016, Ken Magill covered the wild and woolly happenings of online marketing (and email marketing) from its nearly nascent beginnings through to the world-changing behemoth it would become. From DM News, to Magilla Marketing, to the Magill Report, Ken worked hard to pr…
Google first warned earlier this year that they're going to retire accounts that haven't been accessed at all in the past two years. This affects Gmail accounts -- if nobody's home, no emails have been read, nothing's going on, Google is now likely to shut dow…
Hey, people were freaking out five years ago about how Mailchimp was for sure going to shut down email newsletter service TinyLetter. It turns out that the concern was prescient, though just a bit premature. Here we are, five years later, and now Mailchimp has just announced t…
American broadband communications provider Sparklight, aka Cable One , provides service to 1.1 million residential and business customers across 24 states. However, as of July 14, 2022, they no longer provide email service to residential customers . The affected domains are: ca…
Gmail has very recently unveiled a series of new deferral/rejection messages. You may want to familiarize yourself with the following new SMTP responses: 421 4.7.28 Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our user…
Today's guest post comes courtesy of Compliance and Deliverability Enablement expert Alison Gootee , who reminds us of the reason for the (email) season. Take it away, Alison! In the USA, at least, this week is widely considered to be a springboard to the year-end holid…
There's no two ways about it -- it truly is getting trickier to deliver email to Gmail lately. There's a lot going on here -- from the recent past, to what's happening today, through to the very near future. Let me jump right into it, starting with changes that are …
Preparation for the holiday send season -- is it too late? Yeah, might be. BFCM is upon us. It's too late to warm new IP addresses or domains, for example. However, there is one simple trick you can still implement, even now, to help deliver mail better (and possibly faster…
Lo! A different guy just popped up in my Linkedin feed to say that cold leads are cool, because they're not illegal. ( I've heard it before .) And for a bonus, he wants to argue about whether or not cold lead emails truly are "spam" -- he says no. That's f…
