Recent Posts

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process.

TLS and Gmail delivery

I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.

Low bounce rates don’t mean a list is good

Many people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists.

Explicit consent

I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this:

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox.

The many meanings of opt-in

An email address was entered into our website

An email address was associated with a purchase on our website.

Email filters and small sends

Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect?

The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia

There has to be an corollary for email. For instance, over the last week or so I’ve gotten an influx of questions about how to fix delivery for one to one email. Some have been from clients “Oh, while we’re at it… this happened.” Others have been from groups I’m associated with “I sent this message and it ended up in spam.”

AMP and Gmail

Yesterday,Gmail announced they’re rolling out AMP support in their web client, with support for mobil coming soon.

Shared environments

In the email system there are all sorts of different belief systems. One contingent will have you believe that IP reputation is the be all and end all of delivery. Get a decent IP reputation, and the clouds will part, angels will sing and your mail will reach the inbox. This group of folks often recommends every sender should have their own dedicated IP address. Anything less is just admitting your mail will never reach the inbox.

Phishing and authentication

This morning I got a rather suspicious message from a colleague on LinkedIn.