Mickey says: Don't Panic
Deliverability folks love their dashboards.But too often, a dip in open rates or a spike in bounces sends people into full-on panic mode. My friend, expert deliverability consultant Mickey Chandler...
View ArticleOrange.fr tightens spam complaint thresholds
Sending email messages to French subscribers with mailboxes hosted by Orange?Starting in mid-August 2025, Orange.fr will begin "triggering protection mechanisms" if your spam complaint rate reaches 0.6...
View ArticleSpam Resource hits five million views!
WOW! Thank you everyone for your readership, friendship, shared knowledge and insight over the years. Because of all of you, Spam Resource has just reached 5 million views, according to my blog stats!...
View ArticleSo Many Words About Spam, Email, and Deliverability
As I have mentioned before: The actual, correct count of page views for Spam Resource is lost to the mists of time. While I moved the blog to Google's Blogger platform way back in August, 2006, the...
View ArticleTop Five Spam Resource Posts of All Time
As I celebrate this milestone of five million views, I thought it would be fun to throw in a bonus post showing what posts garnered the most traffic, ever, on Spam Resource. Check out the list below,...
View ArticleRe-Engagement Campaigns: Will That Winback Email Help or Hurt?
I sometimes call a re-engagement campaign a "winback" campaign because the goal is simple: try to "win back" a subscriber, meaning to keep them active in your email database. The catch is that every...
View ArticleGmail says: No funny (or smiley) business in friendly from
Google recently updated its email sender guidelines with clearer instructions on what not to do when it comes to your sender name (the friendly from) and your subject line. The main point: misleading...
View ArticleSteve Atkins: Swaks on macOS
Swaks has long been my favorite quick and dirty tool for poking at mail servers. It's powerful, flexible, scriptable, and it doesn't hide anything behind a shiny GUI. I find it perfect for connecting...
View ArticleTop 5 Ways to Check your Email Reputation
Reputation is an oft-used term in the realm of sending email. We encourage those sending email marketing, newsletters, or other legitimate emails to have a good sending reputation, but we rarely...
View ArticleGmail says: Yes to angle brackets in the Message-ID
Here's a quick reminder for anyone building their own email messages: Gmail wants your Message-ID header to be properly formatted, which means that the message-ID value must be enclosed in angle...
View ArticleWebinar alert: New Microsoft Sender Requirements
Microsoft recently joined the "top four" mailbox providers (aka "MAGY," Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Yahoo) with updated authentication and email hygiene standards for email senders. If you send more...
View ArticleYahoo Mail adds Catch Up Functionality
Yahoo Mail is trying to help the inbox-overwhelmed crowd get back on top of unread piles with a new mobile feature called Catch Up.This AI-powered tool is live now in the Yahoo Mail app for iOS and...
View ArticleYahoo taking over MX for ATT domains
Yahoo Mail has long been the webmail destination for mail sent to the AT&T consumer mailbox domains. Meaning that if you had an AT&T email account, you used Yahoo Mail to read any email...
View ArticleAlways remember: spam is a state of mind
Just about weekly, somebody reaches out to me with something like this: Help! Our email marketing campaigns are going to the spam folder. I read your advice, so I've implemented SPF, DKIM and DMARC,...
View ArticleA note on terminology pronunciation
Allow me to waste just a tiny little bit of blog space today to help you answer a question that you were probably afraid to ask: How do you pronounce the terms DKIM and DMARC? Let me answer that, and...
View ArticleIt's actually usually safe to unsubscribe
The Wall Street Journal recently ran a piece warning readers not to click unsubscribe links in emails. The idea is that these links are sometimes traps used by bad actors to harvest information,...
View ArticleLE says: No more Certificate Expiry Emails
As of June 4, 2025, Let's Encrypt has stopped sending out email reminders for upcoming TLS certificate expirations. They publicly announced the change in late June to make sure users aren't caught off...
View ArticleBook break: The Ultimate Spam Cookbook Expanded Edition
Way back in 2020, I shared with you "The Ultimate SPAM Cookbook" and a lovely review of it (with a few recipes) from Miriam Di Nunzio of the Chicago Sun-Times, and since then, a new version has been...
View ArticleMicrosoft says: Too Many Connections
Here's one I hadn't seen before. A sender was hitting this deferral when trying to deliver mail to Microsoft (Hotmail/Outlook.com) domains: smtp;451 4.7.652 The mail server [x.x.x.x] has exceeded the...
View ArticleCloudflare now requires auth for email forwarding
As of July 3, 2025, Cloudflare is enforcing a new requirement for its Email Routing platform: Messages must be authenticated with either SPF or DKIM in order to be forwarded. Now, if a message doesn't...
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