How much has changed and will change

I was on a call with a client today and they wanted to talk about the handshake agreement about bounce handling I mentioned last week. As I started to really talk about it, I realised how much has changed in the years since that meeting. 

It was a bit of the wild west of email and spam. CAN SPAM didn’t exist. Gmail didn’t exist. Global email volume, even including spam probably didn’t top a billion emails a day. Return Path didn’t offer certification. Ironport had outgoing email appliances. Bonded Sender was the only certification in town. SNDS wasn’t a thing. Feedback loops didn’t exist. This is spam buttons and spam folders didn’t exist.

The industry has drastically changed in the last decade and a half. I see us entering another explosive period of change. Just the last few days I’ve heard of multiple new outgoing MTAs. A few years ago it looked like everything had consolidated on MessageSystems. Now, other players are moving in to that market. How mail is filtered is diverging and the old delivery rules and best practices are becoming more and more receiver specific.

This isn’t a “what’s happening in 2019.” I don’t have any specific predictions. I just know I’ve been watching this industry enough that I’m seeing signs that we’re entering into another period of growth and expansion.

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Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on a limb and predict the death of email, but I think that’s been way over done.
ChangeConstant
Even major technical advancements, like authentication protocols and the rise of IPv6, are not usually sudden. They’re discussed and refined through the IETF process. While some of these changes may seem “all of a sudden” to some end users, they’re usually the result of years of work from dedicated volunteers. The internet really doesn’t do flag days.
One major change in 2014, that had significant implications for email as a whole, was a free mail provider abruptly publishing a DMARC p=reject policy. This caused a lot of issues for some small business senders and for many individual users. Mailing list maintainers are still dealing with some of the fallout, and there are ongoing discussions about how best to mitigate the problems DMARC causes non-commercial email.
Still, DMARC as a protocol has been in development for a few years. A number of large brands and commercial organizations were publishing p=reject policies. The big mail providers were implementing DMARC checking, and rejection, on their inbound mail. In fact, this rollout is one of the reasons that the publishing of p=reject was a problem. With the flip of a switch, mail that was once deliverable became undeliverable.
Looking back through any of the 2014 predictions, I don’t think anyone predicted that two major mailbox providers would implement p=reject policies, causing widespread delivery failures across the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it, all of my discussions with people about DMARC centered around business using DMARC to protect their brand. No one mentioned ISPs using it to force their customers away from 3rd party services and discussion lists.
I think the only constant in the world of email is change, and most of the time that change isn’t that massive or sudden, 2014 and the DMARC upheaval notwithstanding.
But, still, I have some thoughts on what might happen in the coming year. Mostly more of the same as we’ve seen over the last few years. But there are a couple areas I think we’ll see some progress made.

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Happy 2018

This is the time of year when everyone starts posting their predictions for the coming year. Despite over a decade of blogging and close to 2500 blog posts, I have’t consistently written prediction articles here. Many years I don’t see big changes on the horizon, so there’s not a lot to comment on. Incremental changes are status quo, nothing earth shattering there. But I’ve been thinking about what might be on the horizon in 2018 and how that will affect email marketing.

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More predictions for 2016

This morning I had the pleasure of participating in the SparkPost 10 experts in 50 minutes webinar. I am honored to be included with such a smart group of forward thinking leaders in the email space.
sparkpost_speakersThe webinar was also live tweeted using #emailpros. I’ve put together some of my favorite tweets from today.
What was fun for me was listening to the similarities and differences in our views. Multiple people mentioned authentication and security. Other people focused on display and creatives. Privacy and big data was another theme through multiple speakers. Our Canadian representative gave us a good summary of CASL enforcement. We also had some insightful comments about how deliverability is changing for the B2B market.
I’m definitely stealing B2H. I tweeted B2Host, but also saw someone use B2Human. Both work. It’s a term that really captures what deliverability is about. The human behind the email address is critical for getting to the inbox. B2H! Beautiful.

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