Recent Posts

Stop obsessing about open rates

In 2020:

  • 250OK says open rates were much lower than ESPs report.
  • The Only Influencers list hosts a discussion about the value and use of open rates.
  • A potential client contacts me asking if I can get their open rates to a certain percentage.
  • A client shows me evidence of 100% inboxing but wants to improve their open rate.
  • An industry group runs sessions at multiple meetings discussing how inaccurate open rates are.

The industry needs to stop obsessing over open rates.

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The OSI Seven Layer Model

In the 1970s, while the early drafts of the Internet were being developed, a competing model for networking was being put together by the ISO (International Organization for Standardization).

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Some Microsoft thoughts

Right at the end of January, Microsoft appears to have made couple of changes to how they’re handling authentication. The interesting piece of this is that, in both cases, Microsoft is taking authentication protocols and using them in ways that are slightly outside the spec, but are logical extensions of the spec.

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Your first M3AAWG meeting

It’s that time of year again where nearly all my client calls involve the question, “are you going to be at M3AAWG SF?” Up until last year, the answer was always yes. But now it’s not a brief drive up the peninsula and a BART ride into the city, it’s a transatlantic plane flight.

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When opens hurt reputation

Podia has scraped the Word to the Wise blog and I’m currently receiving an ongoing drip campaign from them absolutely begging me to mention them in my blog post on cold emails.

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Using Reply-To:

Yesterday I learned that some ESPs don’t support the reply to: address. I asked around to discover which ESPs did. Here’s what I learned.

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Troubleshooting: part 3

As I continue to think about how people troubleshoot email delivery I keep finding other things to talk about. Today we’re going to talk about the question most folks start with when troubleshooting delivery. “Did ISP change something?”

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What about the email client?

There are a lot of folks in the email industry that take issue with my stance that DMARC is not a viable solution to phishing. DMARC, at it’s absolute best, addresses one tiny, TINY piece of phishing.

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Same MX, different filters

One of the things I do for clients is look at who is really handling mail for their subscribers. Steve’s written a nifty tool that does a MX lookup for a list of domains. Then I have a SQL script that takes the raw MX lookup and categorizes not by the domain or even the MX, but by the underlying mail filter.

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The variables are not independent

In my previous career I was a molecular biologist. Much of my work was done on bacteria but after I left grad school, I ended up working in a developmental biology lab. Bacteria were (mostly) simple: just about every trait was controlled by a single gene. We could study what that gene did by removing it from the bacteria or adding it to a well characterised bacteria.

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