Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

Just the other day, I saw someone post another one of those "Deliverability Ranked by ESP" charts, and frankly, it drives me nuts. These charts are inaccurate and misleading. There is no useful way to generate a single "snapshot metric" that tells you you…

If you've been watching data privacy developments in Europe, you already know that the current rules around open tracking (pixel tracking) in email marketing are ... messy , to put it mildly. The regulatory environments in France (CNIL) and Italy (Garante) have thrown a lot…

Let’s say you run a business selling, oh, I dunno, widgets. Maybe sticky, flat widgets, printed on one side, where you peel off the back so buyers can slap them onto a laptop or a bumper. You’ve sold a lot of those widgets over the years, which means you’re sitting on a massive…

Microsoft's sender reputation data portal ( Smart Network Data Services , or SNDS) and their ISP feedback loop mechanism (Junk Mail Reporting Program, or JMRP), are undergoing a transition. The SNDS website relaunched in June, 2026, with updated access controls and some ch…

DMARC has been updated! Three new RFCs have been published (RFCs 9989 , 9990 , and 9991 ) governing the latest incremental updates to the DMARC standard. TL;DR? It's all about the DNS tree walk, privacy concerns around failure reporting, and removing little used flags (PCT,…

If your attempts to send email to Microsoft-hosted inboxes are bouncing back intermittently with authentication-related rejections; specifically highlighting that DKIM is failing, when you know you’ve got DKIM authentication correctly implemented: what do you do now? The actual…

CNIL, France’s data protection and privacy authority , recently announced new restrictions and requirements related to open tracking (aka pixel tracking) and things are relatively complex. The TL;DR is that permission is required before tracking opens, there’s a potential exemp…

If you’ve got an active alumni email account from the University of Colorado Boulder, you might have already seen the announcement : Your alumni email account is going away as of August 31, 2026. This affects email accounts in the domain colorado.edu — not all accounts, as this…

DMARCbis: What is it and what do you need to know? It’s the updated version of the email authentication-related DMARC internet specification, and it modifies how DMARC works in a few small, but important, ways. If you’re curious to learn more, check out my latest Valimail &quo…

Curious about BIMI adoption rates? Looking for BIMI success stories? The fact is, BIMI helps boost email engagement. And if you’re looking for the data to make the business case for BIMI, this recent webinar has what you need to help you support the argument for implementing a …

As you might have seen me mention on Linkedin this week, I'm still working to fully wrap my head around DKIM2, specifically thinking about a couple of different things: the impact on DMARC and the impact on ESP platforms. Let me tell you what I know and what I don't kno…

Staff from mailbox provider GMX/WEB.DE/mail.com (1&1 Mail & Media GmbH) have just announced on the Mailop list that they'll begin enforcement of DMARC checks in a phased rollout over the coming weeks. What does this mean? It means that if you publish a DMARC polic…

Zeta Global just posted their latest email and SMS benchmark report. Curious about open, click and unsub percentages across a whole bunch of industry sectors? Zeta's got that. Retail, Financial Services, Travel and Hospitality, Media and more. It's good stuff, especiall…

Another day, another issue with DKIM signatures. As has happened before, and as will likely happen again, everything looks great for an email message at mailbox provider A, but gets rejected or otherwise runs into trouble at mailbox provider B. If you’ve been in email deliverab…

It's time for another installment of our DELIVTERMS series here on Spam Resource, where we help you digest and understand the alphabet soup of email technology. Today, we're looking at MTA-STS (and TLS Reporting). MTA-STS stands for: Mail Transfer Agent-Strict Transpor…

If you want to learn more about the value of and potential benefit from BIMI (Brand Indicators for Message Identification), the inbox logo standard that helps you build email trust and boost engagement with your subscribers, then this is the webinar for you! Join Al Iverson (Va…

My friend Mickey Chandler recently posted a great new blog post explaining what an email sender can do with DMARC aggregate reporting. Specifically, what the reporting can tell you with regard to troubleshooting mailbox provider-specific email authentication failures. What you …

There have been a few different blog posts, Linkedin posts, and email newsletters talking about DKIM2 lately. And oof, most of them seem to get one or more of the details wrong. People mean well, so let's forgive them -- this is a complex thing, and it's easy to misunde…

We often talk about the importance of "keeping a clean house" when it comes to deliverability. But list hygiene isn't just about bouncing bad addresses; it’s about managing the entire subscriber lifecycle to ensure mailbox providers see you as a sender people actu…