Recent Posts

How much has changed and will change

• laura
• Industry

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. 

What’s a bounce?

• laura
• Faq , Industry

Bounces and bounce handling is one of those topics I’ve avoided writing about for a long time. Part of my avoidance is because there are decades of confusing terminology that hasn’t ever been really defined. Untangling that terminology is the first step to being able to talk sensibly about what to do. Instead of writing a giant long post, I can break it into smaller, more focused posts.

How accurate are reports?

• laura
• Industry

One of the big topics of discussion in various deliverability circles is the problems many places are seeing with delivery to Microsoft properties. One of the challenges is that Microsoft seems to be happy with how their filters are working, while senders are seeing vastly different data. I started thinking about reporting, how we generate reports and how do we know the reports are correct.

Mailbox providers

• laura
• Industry

The other day I tweeted that I often used the term “receivers” to describe receiving MTAs.

Reputation is in the eye of the beholder

• laura
• Industry

A few years ago reputation was generally recognised as one thing. If a sending reputation or IP reputation was good in one place it was likely good in other places. Different entities mostly reputation using the same set of signals albeit slightly tweaked to meet their own needs. More recently there is a divergence in how reputation is measured, meaning delivery can be vastly different across entities.

Targets and measures

• laura
• Industry

It’s a new year, do you know what your filters are doing?

• laura
• Best practices

Yesterday the NJABL domain expired. The list was disabled back in 2013 but the domain continued to be maintained as a live domain. With the expiration, it was picked up by domain squatters and is now listing everything. Steve wrote about how and why expired blocklist domains list the world last year.

Welcome 2019

• laura
• Industry

It’s the beginning of a new year and everyone is breaking out posts either reviewing the previous year or making predictions for the next year. I’ve done both over the years.

Temporary fixes

• laura
• Industry

If your mail goes back to spam within a month of “fixing” a delivery problem, then you never really fixed the problem. You just evaded filters for a short time. The filters caught up and the problem is definitely your mail.

Gmail tab weirdness

• laura
• Industry

Lots of reports today about mail being delivered to unusual tabs today. Mail that normally goes to promotions is in updates, updates are in the inbox, things like that.