Ask Al: 18 Months, 61 Videos

Ask Al: 18 Months, 61 Videos

Just around eighteen months ago, I started work on a new video series for my employer, DMARC provider Valimail. The goal? Answer an email related question, usually with a focus of email deliverability or email authentication, with a short video, every week or two. Thus, “Your Email Authentication and Deliverability Questions Answered” was born. Here I am, sixty one videos later, having created six hours, thirty-two minutes, and twelve seconds of video content, answering your questions.

In those videos, I’ve covered email authentication concepts and questions: What are SPF, DKIM and DMARC? What does alignment mean? What should you do when your email service provider platform can’t customize the return-path domain? How do BIMI logos work? What’s a VMC and what trademark jurisdictions do they cover? Which mailbox providers display BIMI logos, and what does it actually look like?

I’ve talked about compliance, blocklist and security related topics, too. PCI compliance and how it ties into DMARC, the DKIM L= tag vulnerability, certificate provider issues, Spamhaus and blocklistings, and more.

And of course, email sender requirements. Updated requirements from Microsoft. Google ramping up enforcement. Convergence of sender requirements across the biggest mailbox providers (Microsoft, Apple, Gmail, Yahoo Mail) and others (La Poste), and much, much more.

Video is a new realm for me. I’ve never done something like this before and I didn’t have a video expert to help me figure out the tech or the process, making the resulting output perhaps a bit rough-n-ready. My process is still a bit fluid today, but I hope that folks have found the videos interesting and insightful. This all very much fits with my personal goal of helping improve the email ecosystem by helping folks understand and work their way through the different email-related challenges that they face.

You can find the series playlist on Youtube, if you'd like to follow along. Below find links to all sixty-one videos, in reverse chronological order:
What did I get wrong? What did I get right? What would you like me to cover in the future? I'd love to hear your feedback and suggestions for future questions to answer. Please drop me a line!
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Al Iverson
Writing about, guiding clients on, and building tools related to email technology, deliverability and DMARC. Blogging about spam since 2001. Based in Chicago.