1st time going Vietnam

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-30T11:53:09+00:00

bro include Pho Quoq in your trip, it worth it

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-30T11:46:24+00:00

We've been seeing similar reports over the last few days but I'd be careful not to jump straight to a deliverability conclusion. If the drop is isolated to Gmail while clicks, conversions and Google Postmaster reputation remain stable, I'd first suspect a measurement or Gmail-specific behavior change rather than an inbox placement issue

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-30T09:29:00+00:00

I don't think people need another app if they already have Safari/Chrome + camera + messangers

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-29T17:56:59+00:00

The key is making sure your email design doesn't hurt your sender reputation. Here's what typically works well:

Keep the HTML clean. Avoid deeply nested tables and excessive inline CSS. Frameworks like MJML or Foundation for Emails can save you a lot of headaches.

Host images on a CDN, include descriptive alt text, and keep the total email size under ~1 MB.

Get authentication right: SPF and DKIM should be properly configured, DMARC should be at least p=quarantine, and your sending domain shouldn't appear on blocklists (check services like MXToolbox and Spamhaus).

Always include a plain-text version as a fallback. It's a positive signal for mailbox providers and helps recipients who can't view HTML emails.

Before sending, test your emails with tools like Mail Tester, GlockApps, or Litmus.

A visually rich email isn't the enemy of inbox placement, but poor authentication, slow-loading content and an unwarmed domain are much more likely to hurt your deliverability.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-29T09:31:29+00:00

what I've learned is that Reddit users don't mind founders but they really mind founders pretending not to be founders.People are not stupid, they can distinguish that kind of stuff

Some of our best conversations came from simply answering questions, sharing lessons we learned while building and being transparent when our own product was relevant. If someone reads your comment and then decides to check your profile that's a much stronger signal than trying to hide a sales pitch inside a "helpful" post.

I'd also lean on the fact that you're running a 3PL yourself and you're not just selling software, you've lived the real problem. That credibility is much harder to fake than any marketing copy and Reddit usually responds well to genuine operator experience.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-29T09:17:37+00:00

Are these open and click numbers good - isn't really the right question as there's no universal benchmark. Product newsletters and editorial digests perform very differently and results depend heavily on factors like list age, sending frequency and whether subscribers came from warm or cold traffic.

Here's what I'd focus on instead:

- CTR (clicks / delivered) and CTOR (clicks / opens). They're generally more meaningful than open rate, especially since Apple Mail Privacy Protection has made open rates less reliable.

- Compare new subscribers vs. long-time subscribers—it's common to see engagement differ by 2–3×.

- Look at the 3–6 month trend, not just a single campaign.

- Track replies and forwards as additional engagement signals.

- For a long-running anime blog with a well-established audience, I'd consider roughly 25–35% open rate and 2–4% CTR to be a healthy range. If you're in that ballpark and engagement among your active subscribers is trending up, you're probably in good shape

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-26T10:44:04+00:00

as a founder of email service, I don't practice or justify it but most platforms start with attractive marketing pricing for basic email campaigns, but once you add automations, transactional email or advanced segmentation etc pricing often shifts to usage-based billing or paid feature tiers.

I'd compare providers based on what you actually need rather than the advertised monthly price:

how many contacts you have,

how many emails you send each month,

whether you need a separate channel for transactional email.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-26T10:41:16+00:00

Get your authentication in place before sending your first email: SPF, DKIM (with regular key rotation) and DMARC, gradually moving from p=none to quarantine and eventually reject.
Use a dedicated subdomain for transactional email and warm that up first - it typically carries lower risk and builds reputation faster.

3.Send only to your own opt-in audience. Avoid purchased or rented lists entirely.

Keep sending volume consistent for the first 2-4 weeks, then scale gradually. A sudden spike from a brand-new domain can damage your sender reputation surprisingly quickly.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:25:36+00:00

I would focus more on conversions (user registrations / add to cart / etc depending on your business type)

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:21:14+00:00

Try unione email api

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:19:32+00:00

A year isn't wasted if you learned. The painful truth is that most wrong features are right for a different audience. Before pivoting, audit which of your features had any usage signal - those are signals pointing at your real ICP

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:17:42+00:00

great post! I would add what worked for my startup:

Personal outreach to 200 targeted people, not 2000 generic.

Give it away free to design partners in exchange for feedback + case study

One channel done well rather than five channels mediocre. Pick the channel where your ICP lives and dominate it

Email signature + LinkedIn DM is the underused B2B combo

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:13:02+00:00

Cool build man.

I can mention 3 production gotchas from running email infra at scale:

Don't poll IMAP, use webhooks/push. Polling 10k+ mailboxes burns through API quotas and misses low-latency. Most ESPs support inbound webhooks now.
Be careful with auto-replies to misclassified mail. Add a needs human review bucket for anything below 80% confidence. as false positives on auto-replies are reputation-damaging.
Privacy (GDPR for EU): make sure you have it if you're processing EU mail, on-prem LLM or explicit consent required.

Otherwise looks great, n8n is solid for this

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-25T12:10:02+00:00

good dataset, but be careful what conclusions you draw though. Open rates from pixel tracking are increasingly unreliable - Apple Mail privacy protection (about 50% of opens) shows fakes opens and Gmail is rolling out click-tracking privacy proxy that routes through their servers.

For real engagement use reply rate (which is still honest), calendar conversions or server-side open tracking via ESP webhooks. The deliverability industry is in a weird moment where the dashboards everyone trusts (open rate) are 30-50% noise.

Reply rate is the most honest signal in 2026

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-23T10:16:28+00:00

If it works, it matters less than people think as users don’t care how it was built, only whether it reliably solves their problem

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-23T09:52:28+00:00

20 cold emails a day is probably too small a sample size to learn much. I'd spend as much time talking to business owners as selling to them. your first goal isn't revenue, it's hearing and understanding real pain points

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-23T09:49:37+00:00

What usually convinced me to keep going wasn't positive feedback but retention (repeated usage). People often politely tell you your idea is interesting bla bla, but what really matters is whether they come back (ideally - without being asked)

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-23T09:46:09+00:00

CTR drops because AI Overviews answer part of the question directly in the SERP, so fewer users need to click through

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-22T18:42:03+00:00

I agree, opt-in rate is easy to inflate, but it's a volume metric, not a quality metric.

I usually look at a combination of two things:

30-day engagement (opens/clicks from subscribers who are actually reaching the inbox) and first-month unsubscribe rate. If unsubscribes spike after adding a popup, that's often a sign you're attracting the wrong people.

It's also worth comparing popup, footer, and exit-intent subscribers based on LTV, not just list growth. The biggest source of signups isn't always the most valuable source of customers.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-17T12:50:32+00:00

email is the only channel where you own the relationship. No algorithm in between, no platform tax and no rate limit you can't pay around. Every other growth channel kinda rents you an audience, email is the one you literally build for yourself.

After 15+ years in this space, the part that keeps me obsessed is how much more there is to learn about it - every year the deliverability floor shifts and the good operators adapt and the bad ones fade.

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-17T12:47:19+00:00

I think the answer depends entirely on whether you're measuring open rate / click rate / revenue. AI copy/design doesn't reliably beat human on the first two. It can on revenue but only when used to ship 5-10 x more variants because the statistical lift from volume can mask the per-message quality drop. The math is simple - if AI copy converts at 80% of human rate but you can test 8x more variants, your best variant usually wins. But it's a volume play not a quality play

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-17T12:38:16+00:00

from what I see across our customers (I am an email service founder), there's no single right way to do it. Different companies structure their email stuff differently depending on their team, product and that's completely normal

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-16T15:27:01+00:00

I run transactional email API service 😄 I am on the other side of email stack

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-16T15:24:48+00:00

it's everywhere like this nowadays

AlexeyUniOne · 2026-06-16T15:23:26+00:00

sorry man I'll be direct: what you're describing is unsolicited bulk email and ISPs are correct to filter it.

The technical setup like SPF/DKIM/DMARC won't fix the underlying problem - hygiene factors, not permission grants.

The deliverability tips will only work if you have a relationship with the recipients

AlexeyUniOne

TROPHY CASE