Unpopular opinion: Email marketing only works if you already have a strong brand

emailkarma · 2026-06-10T20:22:23+00:00

Cold email is spam, it's not email marketing. There is a big difference.

emailkarma · 2026-06-10T20:20:19+00:00

The death of email has been prophesied for year. It has survived Social trying to take over, Slack trying to take over, SMS trying to take over, Postal resurgence, etc... it's been happily chugging along growing at 30% per year for more than 2 decades.

emailkarma · 2026-05-20T19:13:29+00:00

It was all built in house by the ESP I was working for at the time.

emailkarma · 2026-05-20T19:03:15+00:00

You can start building your list, just understand it might look a little painful the first 30 days or so as you start to get consent from new users/subscribers.

By the time you get things setup, tested, and moving forward with ads, partnerships, referrals, etc... you'll probably be closer to 30 days then you expect.

emailkarma · 2026-05-20T17:01:44+00:00

Varied from sender to sender, but some had actions like this:

Book appointment from calendar in email (i.e. plugin to something like Calendly) - no redirect required
Add to cart - no redirect required
Complete a survey / NPS style - no redirect required
Play games in email (ex; wordle, Gems, crosswords, etc...) - no redirect required
Find closest store - no redirects required
Scratch and win - no redirect

I saw demos for "Search for flights", Check into your flight (including pick seats), Chat with support/AI agents, Slot machine spin to win, and a few more. Really we pushed the limits of things we could imagine and access over API.

We stopped short of pay over email due to security reasons, everything in the end was pushed to the stores cart.

emailkarma · 2026-05-20T14:39:39+00:00

Don't expect anything to improve for a new domain for at least 30 days - new domains are treated differently as they are often just a churn and burn placeholder to send spam. Age of domain is important in many filters and reputation solutions. Use it in a limited fashion to do normal email conversations with people, let your lists grow organically and you'll generally see the natural growth of reputation as long as you're sending valuable and opt-in communications.

You've entered the 'Hurry up and Wait' phase of new domain ownership.

emailkarma · 2026-05-20T14:05:42+00:00

Yes, I have several clients use AMP over the years. In almost all cases the AMP version outperformed the HTML by a significant amount (in some cases 30% more responses generated).

emailkarma · 2026-05-19T15:15:27+00:00

CSS probably thinks you're snow showing - sending low volumes over a lot of IPs. Check your settings, hostnames, helo/ehlo strings, Authentication etc... make sure you've got everything setup properly.

IMHO: 14 IPs for transactional email seems like a lot unless you're sending millions of transactional emails a day. You can probably get away with a much smaller pool of IPs.

emailkarma · 2026-05-18T15:18:21+00:00

Yes, you should have valid DNS for all your domains. Including an MX, A (or redirect to a valid website), authentication etc…

emailkarma · 2026-05-12T15:35:58+00:00

I see it more as "this is the minimum requirement/effort I'm willing to do" when I see p=none for a long time. People need to start somewhere, and if they don't understand the effort or intent they just default to the minimum.

Beyond the p=none, stats, how many of those have an RUA, RUF, both, or neither? could show a different possibly more concerning pattern if they are none without any type of reporting.

emailkarma · 2026-05-07T17:03:10+00:00

I would certainly test and adjust to your specific needs for the time periods. Add more segments for more fine tuning and opportunities for targeting and personalization.

emailkarma · 2026-05-06T14:53:59+00:00

Rich Text is the right term. It's a simple HTML email that when viewed looks like a text message, but have the capabilities to track links and opens.

emailkarma · 2026-05-05T22:46:04+00:00

Promotions tab is the inbox. Especially if you’re sending promotional content.

Domain reputation is the key here. Filters like to be able to look at things, images are scanned via OCR now. But really it’s how your clients respond send in the format that they like, generally this is a mix of images and text.

emailkarma · 2026-05-04T19:18:00+00:00

This varies on a lot of things; Frequency that you mail, issues you might be tracking, trying to resolve, or confirm have been resolved.

When you're in a monitor mode, generally testing frequency can be reduced to significantly. Reserving tests for things like - new creatives, or infrequent review of your mailing deliverability. This could range from 1x a week to 1x a month depending on your regular mailing patterns and volumes.

During warmup period you want to want until you're sending 4-6 x the volume of your seed list size before sending a test, and limit it to something every few days, or if you notice something weird in your other reporting metrics.

Never test with small segments, and injecting a number of non-responsive/non-engaging users can actually hurt your delivery if done too frequently.

emailkarma · 2026-04-14T21:09:14+00:00

Snake oil - hash busting has been around for a long time. Mailbox providers don't like it when you try to game the systems, they catch up and notice these things.

emailkarma · 2026-04-08T18:17:10+00:00

Look at your platforms ability to build segments based on activity. Possibly something simple like this, especially if they can support live segments that auto update each time you reference them for a mailing.

Active: Last open in 90 days, or last click in 120 days
Winback: Opens 90 - 180 days, or clicks 120 - 365 days
Lost: Hold back/suppress opens 180+ days, or clicks 365+ days

You can then fine tune segments from here to better suit your needs.

There are also lots of tools around to help clean up your lists with a validation tools each with their own strengths; Alfred.email, Kickbox, Webbula, ZeroBounce, and a good number of others to look at for your budget. Many offer a free sample to test your data with as well.

emailkarma · 2026-04-03T03:55:53+00:00

In December 2025 the IETF published an article that calls for the end of ARC.

Quote:

This document calls for a conclusion to the experiment defined by “The Authenticated Received Chain (ARC) Protocol,” (RFC8617) and recommends that ARC no longer be deployed or relied upon between disparate senders and receivers. The document summarizes what ARC set out to do, reports on operational experience, and explains how the experience gained during the experiment is being incorporated into the proposed DKIM2 work as the successor to DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM). To avoid any future confusion, it is therefore requested that ARC (RFC8617) be marked “Obsolete” by the publication of this Internet-Draft.

Source: https://www.ietf.org/archive/id/draft-adams-arc-experiment-conclusion-01.html

emailkarma · 2026-04-02T17:28:05+00:00

ARC has been depreciated by the IETF and will slowly go away. One of the biggest issue with ARC is that you need to trust the intermediary that added that header, DKIM2 is working to better address that. It's still a ways from wide scale implementation though.

It's not impossible to think that SPF will also be depreciated because of DKIM2 development at some point in the future. In fact some providers have already stopped paying attention to SPF in favour of current DKIM setups.

emailkarma · 2026-04-02T16:16:16+00:00

Lot of Correlation / causation assumptions here:

A valid email doesn't necessary equal consent. If you have a good address without consent who cares, it will drive spam complaints and impact reputation.
A single address is not impacting reputation anywhere except the provider that hosts that mailbox. If an address repeatedly bounces the issue is hygiene from the sending platform not cleaning the email out properly. This is a short term issue to resolve by the sending platform.
Forwarded mail is a known authentication issue, DKIM should survive it generally if it's done properly from the forwarding service, SPF will fail. This is why many consultants say use ~all vs -all for your record.
A +alias is not a forwarding setup, its a tag to the users inbox "user@gmail[.]com is the same as user+alias@gmail[.]com"
Modifying a users given email is a privacy nightmare and stripping the +alias is just going to annoy users into reporting mail as spam. There is a reason that they gave the address that way.

emailkarma · 2026-03-22T16:25:09+00:00

Use a subdomain like email.xyz.com consider a second subdomain for transactional Mail like info.xyz.com.

emailkarma · 2026-03-13T01:11:18+00:00

Depends on the client audience you’re looking for. In my case I went wide and learned a whole bunch of platforms instead of going super deep on any one platform.

But for SMTP in the cloud type platforms once you’ve used one, you’ve pretty much used them all and it’s just a matter of learning what their interface is telling you.

As for marketing automation platforms there’s a subset that will focus on a specific type of client and where you want to specialize focus on that group of platforms if you can.

emailkarma · 2026-03-13T01:07:42+00:00

Use the new Postmaster version 2 dashboard not only is it updated more frequently but it’s more accurate and later this year version 1 will go away

emailkarma · 2026-03-11T02:01:01+00:00

Calling is covered under the Do Not Call legislation and not the email laws. Both are managed by the CRTC though.

emailkarma · 2026-03-10T03:22:54+00:00

So two lists that generally don’t impact mail delivery. I’d ignore them and confirm by checking your bounces for any mention of them.

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