Spam Resource: All Things Deliverability

It's a bit of a cryptic error message, isn't it? Mail bouncing back with "554 5.7.5 Permanent error evaluating DMARC policy." Wondering how to troubleshoot that? Well, I covered exactly this in a recent Ask Al video for Valimail, which was inspired by this Red…

Hey, big senders! Are you unsure about DKIM2 and wondering what you need to know about it? If so, the Certified Senders Alliance (CSA) has got you covered, with a free webinar on this very topic upcoming on Tuesday, August 25th at 9:00 AM US Central Time. Presented by Sebast…

Editor's note: Today I've invited a contribution from Jakub Olexa, CEO of Mailkit and Omnivery . Jakub's a good guy, part of the collaborative spirit that works together to protect the email ecosystem from within, and I was curious about and intrigued by what he…

There's a very exciting new proposed email specification making its way through the IETF, called APRF (Aggregate Performance Reporting). The individual draft specification comes from Alex Brotman of Comcast, Tom Corbett of Iterable, and Emil Gustafsson of Google. And Comcas…

Last October, Yahoo sold AOL to the Italian company Bending Spoons for approximately $1.5 billion (as reported by Forbes and others). If you're asking yourself, " What is Bending Spoons? " you aren't alone. They are a tech company known for acquiring well-kno…

Email-to-SMS gateways were once a popular tool for email geeks and savvy sysadmins to ping themselves with important notifications. Nowadays? They're either dead and gone, in the process of shutting down, or problematic enough that we can't even tell if they're stil…

Looking for a fun way to kill some time before you wrap it up ahead of the weekend? This might help. This YouTube video dives into the history of Hotmail, from how Sabeer Bhatia and Jack Smith came up with the idea for free webmail, to its explosive viral growth, and ultimatel…

In the latest round of email industry consolidation, cloud communications giant Infobip has announced its acquisition of email marketing and infrastructure platform SocketLabs . Infobip is a global cloud communications platform focused primarily on SMS-based communication. The…

If you’re wondering exactly how a mailbox provider like Yahoo, Google, Comcast or Fastmail might implement support for decoding and displaying BIMI (Brand Indicator for Message Identification) logos in or near the inbox, then I’ve got you covered. TL;DR? It boils down to: Valid…

Google recently published a highly practical new help article: Top 10 Gmail sender issues . Here's how to prevent the most common hurdles you might run into when sending mail to Gmail. Seasoned senders will recognize core pillars like authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC) and m…

Apple put out a notification on June 15th that soon, the domains for "Hide My Email" and "Sign in with Apple" masked email addresses will be changing. Previously, "Hide My Email" addresses were generated under the default icloud.com Apple consum…

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…