Email best practices, advice, tools, and industry trends for practical use.
Are you still running an older version of Momentum? In mid-October 2021, our Product Engineering team released Momentum 4.4 which includes some handy feature enhancements. A few highlights of the 4.4 release include: HAProxy support XFER support, for optimizing delivery to domains like orange.fr, cox.net, etc. at scale Scheduled Send support for REST injections FIPS
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The Thanksgiving holiday – and the end of the year in general – is often a time to reflect, and we’re no different at SparkPost. In thinking about what we’re thankful for, it’s not hard to list the positive attributes of the email community and email as a communication channel in general. Here’s a look
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One of the most innovative components of Sparkpost’s Deliverability Analytics is the Blocklist Impact feature. Even the healthiest sender occasionally ends up on a blocklist. This can create a lot of confusion since it’s often not clear which mailbox providers are using which blocklist and what is the resulting impact on deliverability and inbox placement.
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Seeing a high number of complaint alerts from Microsoft? You’re not alone. This is an industry-wide issue that Microsoft is aware of and is actively working on a resolution, but the fix may take some time. While they have indicated that senders should not see an impact on their reputation, we cannot rule out that
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Automatic seeding is now available in Salesforce’s Email Studio & Automation Studio to drive improved deliverability. The next phase of our partnership with Salesforce Marketing Cloud is here – and if you’re an email marketer with too much to do and not enough time, it’s going to be a game-changer. Automatic seeding enables marketers and
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Today, October 29, 2021, we’re celebrating 50 years of email. It’s hard to remember a time when email wasn’t a huge part of our collective consciousness but even just 30 years ago, email was still a strange concept for most. “What, do you write to it? Like mail?!” – Bryant Gumbel 50 years of Email
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“We only allow work-related Slack channels.” 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩 How would you feel if you joined a new company and discovered that the use of Slack was limited to work-related conversation? When I joined SparkPost in August, it was quickly apparent that wouldn’t be the case. I was immediately welcomed to the team and directed to the
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Throughout the last year, the balance between working and finding personal time has completely shifted. Being in an office setting, then coming back home to relax and possibly spend time with your children/spouse has all changed in the blink of an eye. As a college student, taking a full class load, interning, and still having
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Every year, we take on an exciting project of creating a state of the email industry report comprised of a lot of data. (You can still catch the current version here.) Much of that data comes from SparkPost’s permissioned panel and off the massive footprint of sending 4-5 trillion emails per year. To get a
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Email is a key communication channel for businesses to engage with customers. And those emails often contain a lot of information about the products and services being provided – so how can you use that information through email competitive intelligence tracking to help your own business? What is email competitive intelligence tracking? Email competitive intelligence
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(Updated on November 18, 2021 to include information on product features we recently released.) As you have likely heard (and may be stressing about), Apple really rocked the email world when they announced in June that they were planning to anonymize open activity for their email users. Shortly after the announcement, we published a comprehensive
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Email Volume, Engagement and Inbox Rates Since March 2020 It’s been a while since we’ve provided an update on email benchmark trends in light of the pandemic and the ever-evolving situation that has unfolded over the last 16 months. We like to check in periodically to keep tabs on what is happening when it comes
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Intern: A student or trainee who works – sometimes without pay – at a trade or occupation in order to gain work experience. SparkPost Intern: A student who bestows the best opportunity to build their resumé, work and learn from incredible colleagues, make a difference within a company, collaborate across the company, and have a
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One of the questions we regularly receive about our Permissioned Email Panel is how accurate it is in terms of forecasting inbox rates. Historically, this has been a difficult question to answer with any authority as there was no source of ground truth to measure against, and so opinions (and general faith in sample statistics)
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Back in June, we initially reported about the upcoming changes in iOS 15. Since that time, there has been a lot of discussion, articles and webinars about the topic. There’s no doubt the iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection changes are significant and will have a direct impact on how marketers track the success of their
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Empower your team to create better email You may have heard talk of Email Design Systems in the email marketing community lately. They’re a hot topic, and marketing teams are beginning to understand how they can transform the way teams create email – enabling them to do it at pace and scale with total confidence,
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Getting GIFs right in email Lots of marketers have started using more GIFs in email to engage with their audience and bring in a level of animation – which wasn’t previously possible. And whilst brands want to stand out in their subscriber’s inbox, GIFs help do exactly that by catching the reader’s eye through moving
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When SparkPost acquired eDataSource a year and a half ago, the newly combined leadership team set out a compelling vision that turned into an internal mantra of sorts: we aren’t just as good as we were separately, we are in fact #BetterTogether. Our teams rallied around this vision and worked to enact this principle from
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Configuring an Intermediary Domain for DKIM As an email service provider (ESP), there are many different priorities and considerations that you’re factoring – especially when starting out – and one of the most important is for your customers to have an easy onboarding experience. You want customers to successfully set up their integration with your
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As you may have seen in the news, software vendor Kaseya has announced that between 800 and 1,500 businesses have been compromised by a ransomware attack connected to their business. Kaseya said in a statement that approximately 50 of its direct customers were breached in the attack but hundreds more were affected because many of
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Now well-entrenched and highly anticipated, this year’s Prime Day event was Amazon’s seventh. Amazon’s more than 120 million Prime members guarantee the event’s high visibility and reach. Prime Day was a mid-July event for its first five years, but in 2020 the pandemic pushed it back to October. This year’s event resurfaced on June 21-22.
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PMTA Now Has Vault Integration for DKIM Keys We’ve launched an integration with HashiCorp Vault so that you can safely store your DKIM keys outside of your config and behind an access-managed wall. In practice, it looks like this: This is useful for a lot of reasons, but it’s mainly about being able to
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Last year, we published a blog article that shows how to use the ubiquitous and very useful telnet tool to check an SMTP connection. The next step is to simplify the manual process by using an awesome “next level” tool (it refers to itself as the Swiss Army Knife of email) called SWAKS. This is
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Are you having difficulties getting mail delivered to German mailbox providers such as Web.de, Gmx.de, and T-Online.de? If so, you are not the only one. After pouring through postmaster pages and having many email conversations with support teams, here is what I have found to be the key items that you should pay attention to
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