Recent Posts

Deliverability Week

• steve
• Jun 10, 2024

• Best Practices , Delivery Improvement

Next week everyone will be talking Deliverability.

SWAKS: Test your SMTP

• steve
• Jun 5, 2024

• Technical

We’ve mentioned SWAKS here a few times – but I always use it for delivering test mail directly to a recipient’s MX.

No, Google doesn’t hate responsive design

• steve
• Apr 19, 2024

• Best Practices , Industry

I’ve seen a bunch of folks panic about some phrasing in Google’s Email sender guidelines.

DNS for white label authentication with SproutDNS

• steve
• Apr 18, 2024

• Delivery Improvement

I wrote last year about using “stunt” nameservers for customer subdomain authentication – i.e. dynamically generating all the authentication records needed in DNS for each customer as needed.

Deliverability Summit 2024

• steve
• Apr 18, 2024

• Industry

We just got back from Amsterdam a couple of days ago, after attending the Deliverability Summit.

Anatomy of a Received header

• steve
• Mar 27, 2024

• Technical

When trying to find out why Something Went Wrong during delivery of an email we sometimes want to look at the route by which it was delivered.

Looking back, looking forward

• steve
• Mar 23, 2024

• Industry

Six years ago today I wrote here “Spam isn’t going away“, talking about systemic problems at Google, Cloudflare and Amazon and in India.

Errors in DKIM records

• steve
• Feb 28, 2024

• Technical

TXT Records

DKIM public keys live in DNS TXT records. A DNS TXT record contains strings of text, and each string is limited to be no more than 255 characters long.

One-click unsubscribe

• steve
• Jan 31, 2024

• Best Practices , Technical

The worst thing about the yahoogle requirements has been their use of the term “one-click unsubscribe”. It’s an overloaded term that’s being used here to mean RFC 8058 in-app unsubscription. That’s a completely different thing to what one-click unsubscription has been used to mean for decades, often in the context of complying with legal requirements around unsubscription.

Don’t trust Gmail’s Show Original

• steve
• Jan 17, 2024

• Technical

It’s not always easy to know what the actual headers and body of an email as sent look like. For a long time accepted wisdom was that you could send a copy to your gmail account, and use the Show Original menu option to, well, see the original message as raw text.