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 eternity. Context: when Spam Resource launched, the CAN-SPAM Act didn't exist yet. Gmail wasn't even a thought in Google's mind. Mailbox providers, sending platforms, and blocking lists were operating in what felt like the wild west of digital communication.

I feel incredibly lucky to have had the opportunity to share my thoughts with the world for two and a half decades. Looking back, it's amazing to see how both the industry, the email ecosystem, and this blog, have evolved.

From Rants to Requirements: An Evolution

In the early days, Spam Resource was primarily a place for me to vent. I wanted to call out bad senders who didn't respect permission, and rant about the struggles of navigating early anti-spam blocklists and their maintainers. The folks behind those early lists were generally good people trying to solve a massive problem, but back then, the tools were blunt instruments and the humans developing and manning those tools were sometimes making mistakes that I felt were making "us" look bad, that is, harming all of our efforts to stop spam and keep the email inbox safe and usable.

Over time, the blog naturally transformed into something more constructive (I think, I hope): something of a guidebook for the sender side of the email ecosystem.

It became less about pointing fingers and more about showing email marketers how to be good participants in the inbox. What is permission, how to ensure you're getting permission, how to comply with changing standards, and how to send marketing messages (and maybe even make some money) without acting like a spammer.

At this point, this blog is a decades-long investigation into the mechanics of why mail lands in the spam folder, what to do when things go sideways, and how to troubleshoot the plumbing. We've learned to distinguish between the times a deliverability issue is genuinely a mailbox provider glitch (when it's not your fault) and when it's a sign that you need to fix your permission, authentication, or sending practices (when it is your fault).

Some Things Change, Some Things Not

Over 25 years, I've watched an endless parade of tech history, methodologies, and platforms roll by:

• Mailbox providers have risen, merged, or vanished. Remembering the golden days of HoTMaiL, the last hurrahs of AOL dialup, and Compuserve as a valid email domain with actual email users. Nowadays? It's almost all about Gmail, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple.
• Blocking lists have launched, evolved, or shut down completely. The binary blocklists of IP reputation, the most important first steps in the fight to stop spam from overwhelming our inboxes, are no longer where reputation really lives.
• Platforms and email service providers (ESPs) have been acquired, pivoted, gone multi-channel, or retired. Everything became a marketing cloud. Some providers started in SMS and added on email. Others started in email and added on SMS. In the enterprise, everything was a CDP for a while, too. Is everything still a CDP? I've lost track.
• Standards have continually stacked up. From early SPF and original DomainKeys (thanks, Yahoo!), to DKIM, DMARC, BIMI, and today's conversations around DKIM2, APRF, and AI-driven inbox filtering. So. Many. Acronyms.

People have come and gone (RIP, J.D. Falk and Chip House). The tools have changed (RIP, Pivotal Veracity). The rules have tightened (RIP, email append and blasting zillions to work around low engagement). But my dumb little blog, Spam Resource, is still here.

This is your fault: Thank You

None of this would mean anything without you all. The readers, subscribers, deliverability experts new and old, junior and senior. The email marketers, MTA developers, and industry peers who read these posts, send in questions, share feedback, and engage in the conversation every single week.

Thank you to everyone who has stuck with me, whether you've been reading since the early days of IP blocklists (not blacklists) or joined later on, as engagement has evolved to become a reputation metric and more recently, as we've navigated mandatory message authentication and DMARC enforcement, assumptions around political filtering bias, and AI inbox changes. And as the lines have blurred between email deliverability and email security, bringing us all closer together to understand that what we do has an impact on the usability of the email inbox and that we need to work together, collaboratively, to keep email a viable, safe, and usable communication channel.

The email ecosystem isn't going to stop evolving anytime soon. Sender requirements change; senders want to continue to reach the inbox. Threats evolve; bad guys looking for new ways to break through the barriers raised against them. Standards grow and change, as mailbox providers look to better protect, and keep their platforms compelling for, their users. I hope that you and I will both still be a part of that ecosystem, and that I'm able to stay right here, keeping you updated, as I learn more.

Here's to 25 years, and here's to email. It's not dead yet.