Spam Resource Spotlight: LB Blair

It's time for another interview! This time, I have the pleasure of talking to my friend LB Blair!

LB has been in the email industry for nearly ten years now. With stints at IBM (Silverpop), ClickDimensions, 250ok and Validity, she has honed her deliverability knowledge to a sharp, expert consultant's role which encompasses much of what she does now as Head of Deliverability for Email Industries.

You can find her Linkedin Profile here.

LB, thank you for taking the time to talk to me today! We worked together on a webinar recently, where you impressed me with your depth of knowledge in the deliverability space. It's always great to connect with people who know what they're doing and are helping to guide clients in the right direction. How did you land in this world of email and deliverability?

Well, it all started one day when I almost got shot at work. For context I was working at a firearms retailer as a data analyst at the time, which had a gunsmith's shop in the office next to mine. The apprentice gunsmith experienced a negligent discharge while trying to unjam a round from a Luger (which are notorious for slam firing). 20 minutes after I made sure he was okay, the manager that responded to my call delivered a 9mm slug to my desk after removing it from the drywall 6ft from where I had been sitting.

I decided it was time to find a less dangerous profession.

A few weeks later my friend handed my resume to her manager at IBM as they were looking for additional support engineers, a few weeks after that I entered the wonderful world of email.

Prior to starting in email I learned a second language (Spanish) and did policy debate competitively in High School and College, and studied computer forensics, accounting, IT audit, SQL, as well as working in desktop support in a very high security environment.

What does a typical day-in-the-life look like for you at Email Industries? What would you say are the most common challenges you're helping clients work through?

It's really hard to call any day at Email Industries typical due to the fact we've grown and evolved so rapidly since I joined. I work best by dialoguing with my clients regarding their goals and pain points to craft unique solutions and just-in-time advice and data for decision making, so I tend to have a fair number of client meetings. I also meet with prospects that reach out to me on Linkedin or Upwork, assist with pricing, review work product prior to client, publish some mixture of non-sense and wisdom on Linkedin, triage new clients, and deal with things that fall in the category of Weird Tech Problems ™ (those are my favorite).

The team we've built here has some of my absolute favorite people on the planet and I truly consider myself lucky to get up and work with them everyday. It's really exciting to work with so many folks with such deep expertise, we're always educating ourselves and each other regarding what's going on in the industry.

For a time, we were (friendly) competitors in the deliverability consultant space. Then I left that job due to layoff, and I was lucky enough to be able to partner with you for the DMARC-Pocalypse Now webinar (with your great idea for a title). I went on to work for an ESP for a hot minute, so we were both tackling the challenges of Yahoo/Google sender requirements from two different positions. My role was helping nudge a whole bunch of smaller senders to implement DKIM and DMARC ASAP, mostly non-technically-savvy folks sending very small amounts of mail. I'm guessing that's different from the constituency you were dealing with at the time. What kind of challenges did you face getting everybody into "Yahoogle Compliance Mode"? Or did it go smoothly, and it was no big deal at all?

I really can't believe folks keep indulging my ridiculous session titles, I blame Andrew Bonar and Matt Vernhout for starting the trend.

I work with senders of all sizes from businesses only sending a few thousand marketing emails to entire ESPs sending hundreds of millions a month, though these days I focus more on the latter and API or app enabled email sends.

Setting DMARC is part of our standard audit process because it's the best way to get a high level view of all the traffic being sent from a domain. So the majority of our existing customers were either compliant, or well along the path to compliance. We did see an influx of folks wanting audits, but that's typical for Q1, though I think Google joining Yahoo! to mandate authentication for all bulk senders certainly brought a good bit of additional attention to deliverability.

I can say in 6 years of implementing DMARC I generally find at least one noncompliant or totally unauthenticated mail stream in 80% of clients.

Additionally as a sender it is always best to provide Mailbox Providers with your preferred instructions for mail handling (no guarantee they'll oblige) whenever possible and DMARC is just another opportunity to do that.

DMARC, DMARC, DMARC. DMARC? DMARC! It all started just before our webinar back in January, and for me, it hasn't slowed down since. Are you also feeling like every single consulting request or deliverability question recently relates to the Yahoo/Google updated requirements? Or are things finally starting to calm down on that front?

We're still fielding plenty of requests, but we also have continued to see quite a number of concerns of all kinds, and an influx of inexplicable delivery and spam placement issues at Hotmail. We also saw a surge in companies leveraging AI in email or using email for service delivery of AI information products. I think the most interesting trend I've seen over the last several years, is the rise of the niche ESP. Email platforms that specialize in handling mail for a single industry, or industry function, or apps that handle an entire business function for a market sector which includes any email communications around it.

Enough talk about DMARC! Mickey Chandler and I were recently chatting about "steak fingers," a slightly disturbing foodstuff that I think is mostly unique to Texas. Is there a cuisine or snack from your past or present locale or from your background that just speaks to you as representative of a time or place? Either in a good way or a bad way?

That would have to be the Fluffer Nutter, a delicious combination of peanut butter, marshmallow fluff, and bread. My mom used to make these for me as dessert sometimes when I was a child.

Peanuts are still an important crop in Georgia.

We both have names that, while relatively unique, there are at least a few others with exactly the same (or very similar) names. I occasionally get emails meant for a real estate agent in Minnesota, and 20+ years ago, there was this basketball player (don't ask). Do you ever online stalk any of those quasi-namesakes, and is there any one of them you'd happily swap lives or careers with?

So I honestly haven't met too many LBs out there nor LoriBeths, especially not those with my same last name. Though I can easily say I wouldn't swap lives or careers with anyone for anything. I love what I do, I love the path I am on, and the people I'm on it with, so here are some interesting facts about my name. 

• Alexa calls me "pound" cuz I lower-cased the letters "lb" when setting up my Amazon profile. 
• Someone once fat-fingered my name as "LariBath" on a support ticket response and I haven't stopped chuckling about it since. I also often get called MaryBeth because I think that name is more common in the south. 
• My mom picked my name in the delivery room, she was watching Happy Days while in labor and Richie's girlfriend walked in and her name was LoriBeth, and mom decided she liked that. 
• The most famous LoriBeth I know of is LoriBeth Denberg from "All That" with more vital information for your everyday life. 

So much (too much) of deliverability is based around trying to repair a reputation after something went wrong. If you could get the attention of every email marketer on earth to try to convince them of one thing they should do, or one thing they should never do, to keep from screwing up their ability to deliver email successfully, what would you tell them?

Monitoring!!! Having a comparative body of historical data makes troubleshooting issues infinitely faster. So much of my job is playing spot the difference, but if there is no historical body of data then I have nothing to compare against, I have data to do trend analysis on so I can identify the point where the problem began and narrow down the root cause.

Deliverability is always going to be a going concern because spam filters are constantly evolving to respond to emerging threats in the landscape, and scammers are doing the same so they are locked in a never-ending battle of updates. Something like 91% of all cyber threats initiate via email, most of which are phishing attempts, though there are also many that are far more nefarious.

I've found the best way to justify the budget for email deliverability and security monitoring is by looking at how much you spend on email marketing and how much it generates for your business. If deliverability bottoms out all of this spend and revenue is at risk. I really hate seeing folks go through the pain of coming to a dead stop operationally because they can't deliver mail, even from their correspondence platforms.

Deliverability is a discipline where 90% of the solution is often spent identifying the root problem, and an ounce of prevention is worth 5 lbs of cure.

LB, thanks so much for your time and words and knowledge and opinions! I appreciate you!