Overview
00:01:00 Meet Al Iverson y’all!
00:03:13 So, Artificial Intelligence will be in the inbox now?
00:07:06 Is it inaccurate? Can you get past it?
00:28:34 Five inbox logos that are not BIMI
[00:00:00] Eric Trinidad: Welcome to email not Dead. My name is Eric and with me as always is JT Jonathan Taylor, Thomas Torres.
[00:00:08] Jonathan “JT” Torres: That’s too many t’s.
[00:00:08] Eric Trinidad: Yeah, that’s too many T’s. That’s three T’s right there.
Welcome back to 2026 to Email’s Not Dead your source for email information by Geeks for Geeks. Welcome back everybody. How you doing JT?
[00:00:21] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. Doing good. Well, trying to be good. I’m sorry, my voice sounds a little weird. It sounds weird in my head, but I’m all congested and stuff, but here we are.
We’re making it work.
[00:00:29] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Yeah, man. Well, I’m glad you can make it out here. you know, to the internet universe. As you might tell, we actually have a couple friends with us our own mail Maven Allison Gootie deliverability advocate specialist here at Sinch Mailgun.
Allison, what’s up?
[00:00:44] Alison Gootee: I am, I’m up earlier normally than I usually would be. So glad to be here .
[00:00:50] Jonathan “JT” Torres: It’s real early out there.
[00:00:52] Eric Trinidad: Well, yeah, well, glad you can get up early with us and you know, spill some tea on some mail with us. I appreciate your time and I appreciate you getting up.
[00:01:00] Alison Gootee: My pleasure.
[00:01:00] Eric Trinidad: But I’m really excited to have Al Iverson here. Al what is up sir? How are you?
[00:01:06] Al Iverson: Hey Eric. Thanks for having me, man. This is gonna be fun. I’m looking forward to it.
[00:01:09] Eric Trinidad: Yeah, man. So, you’re the delivery expert at spamresource.com also at Valimail. You’ve been in the business for a while,
you wanna give us a little bit of background for those that are uninitiated?
[00:01:20] Al Iverson: Yeah. The short answer is I’m old and I’ve been around forever. So if you just stand still and wait for everybody to walk by, you eventually learn everything.
[00:01:30] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:01:30] Al Iverson: So it’s not really a question of studying, it’s just like you just need to be in one place long enough that everybody sort of wanders past you.
Right. So literally like I sent my first double opt-in confirmation email for a marketing list in like late 1998 or early 1999 for my friend’s jazz club. This is going way back. I, you know, I’ve had. Like seven different careers. Going from like in the nineties, I worked in print advertising and pre-press, so like literally I would work on little bits of retouching and stuff.
It wasn’t really a photo retouch, but you do little bits of that stuff for like, for ads for like Jim Beam and stuff. And that translated into being the Unix admin for the company to setting up the email server to fighting spam. To helping other people figure out how to deal with the spam police and block listings into what we now call deliverability.
So yeah, I’ve been doing that deliverability thing for approximately 175 years.
[00:02:25] Eric Trinidad: Dang. Yeah. Nice. So you’ve been finding a good fight for a while
[00:02:28] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. That’s going by feeling, you know?
[00:02:31] Eric Trinidad: Yeah.
[00:02:33] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: And another example that we all just fall into email. It just happens. You can’t like, yeah.
[00:02:39] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. I, you know what? There’s not maybe there is, I don’t even know. I should maybe look like an email career, you know, that you can get your degree in. I’m pretty sure there is. I just don’t know of it. Off, off hand. Shows what, how much I know, you know, I’ve never heard of anybody majoring in email.
[00:02:54] Al Iverson: It’s one of those things where like people come up and want to ask for like career guidance all the time, and I’ve got absolutely nothing, man. I just like, stuff happens randomly. Like, why am I working for, you know, a DMARC provider now instead of deliverability?
I don’t know. Had an opportunity, decided to try it.
[00:03:13] Eric Trinidad: Yeah, you were standing in the right place at the right time and it just kind of happened, you know? Yeah. Well, right on. Well, appreciate you coming out and, you know, talking with us today. I think the big thing that we wanted to talk here in, in our first episode of 2026 is what’s going on with the new year and AI, you know, a AI’s been kind of like top of mind for a lot of folks and kind of been on our lips for some time, I feel, you know, kind of see what’s going on. And I know you recently put out a post regarding Gmail and the new AI updates that they have going on. So I wanted to kind of get your insights on that and kind of give us some feedback there.
[00:03:49] Al Iverson: Yeah, so people are really freaked out. Email marketers in particular are really freaked out by the announcement of Gemini.
[00:03:56] Alison Gootee: Anything
[00:03:57] Al Iverson: In the inbox? Any, yeah any sort of change at all. Something wiggles in the room and how is this gonna impact?
[00:04:03] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Ah!
[00:04:03] Al Iverson: How is this gonna impact my deliverability? So the first thought people had when they saw, oh my God, AI is coming to the inbox, is that this is gonna wreck everything I’ve been doing.
And so. I didn’t think it was a big deal at first, and I was kind of wrong because people are really freaked out by it. And I think that alone kind of counts as enough to start thinking of it as a big deal. And so, people sort of asking, well, what does Gmail AI in the inbox actually mean? And I think a lot of it is gonna be the impact to senders is gonna be based on AI generated summaries, and for a lot of people, that means do I send emails that can be so easily sort of summarized down to a single sentence? And if the answer is yes. You are probably in trouble. You’ve gotta rethink what you’re doing for email, right? If your emails don’t, are just so uninteresting.
Like 20 years ago, again, ’cause I’m old, like I was helping semantic convert free trial downloads to paid subscriptions for Norton antivirus. We had a double opt in thing set up. You download the 30 day free trial. At the end of the free trial we email you and say, Hey, you want to convert to the paid version?
Just a real simple flat HTML email with a single call to action button. And if you, now 20 years later, if you’re still doing that, you kind of are like stuck in the old ways of doing things. And so that’s the kinda stuff like the value is real low. And mailbox providers know this. They can see the data, right?
They’re better at tracking opens than we are. So they look at that and they see, Hey, what’s the value there? And so if there’s little value there, if you can be so easily summarized down to nothing, kinda rethink what you’re actually doing. Now without going too far off on a tangent here, I think the short version of what people should look for to try to like combat that is look at newsletters, look at what newsletters are doing.
‘Cause newsletters are kind of a bright spot in email. People explicitly sign up for newsletters. They want to read them, that’s why they signed up. They actually wanna read what’s written. They’re gonna go past the little summary and actually read the whole thing. So if you’re an email marketer, let’s think about what can you do to make your content so valuable that people actually want it, like make it more newsletter like, what’s the value there that you can add on top of just trying to get somebody to click the buy button.
[00:06:21] Jonathan “JT” Torres: I feel last year we touched on it a little bit just because Apple had their summaries that were coming in and they weren’t necessarily exactly the same in, in that same way. But, you know, they divided up the inbox you know, the same way that Google had done previously, but using a little bit more of that Apple intelligence version of AI and you know, breaking that up.
And then, you know, we saw it when the updates came out for iOS where you saw your mail client say, Hey, I have mail for you. Here’s a quick summary of what we’ve received. And some of it’s fun to read as garbled mess and some of it is, you know, just a little simple in the way that it looks. But it’s definitely a thing that’s changing the landscape and I think it’s gonna, you know, I mean, obviously, you know, as things are going that way, it’s gonna be much more broad every single day.
So, definitely interesting to see it move that way too.
[00:07:06] Al Iverson: The scary part is, of course, in the first steps, it’s getting it wrong sometimes, right? There was a kind of a famous example in the Apple beta where it was trying to highlight important emails and it actually highlighted a phishing email as an important email.
And so read this one first, which is just the dumbest thing ever. And you think of all of the signals we’ve already got in email that can tell us whether or not an email is valid or not. And Apple, like a lot of people, they fell into the same mistake of just assuming the AI is smarter than everything else.
So there’s a little bit of a learning curve there, and I think people are finally getting wise to it. It was a beta, they were just trying, it was first steps, so it’s understandable that they might not always get it perfect, but there’s all the stuff that they gotta pay attention to and if they don’t get it right, like.
Like, if you remember like Gmail tabs 10 plus years ago now, where people were freaked out about the promotions tab, but. Not everybody likes it, so not everybody wants the robot to organize their inbox for ’em. So a lot of people turned off tabs and a lot of people are turning off the AI summaries too. So I think that’s another thing to sort of keep in mind is not everybody wants to have the robot organized their inbox, so not everybody’s gonna see your email through that.
Let’s still protect against it and hopefully we can all laugh when it does something goofy. What’s really scary to me is when it tries to summarize an offer and it gets the math wrong, which is crazy, like if it’ll come up and say, here’s your 60% coupon code, and then you open the email and it’s actually a 20% coupon code, whose fault is that?
Is that a liability? Because I’ve seen that happen, like it’ll mis parse the schema or whatever, and that’s not cool. That’s not okay. That can’t persist. Hopefully that stuff will get better but that’s sort of the scary side of just like unleashing the robot to let it try to summarize stuff for you.
[00:08:55] Alison Gootee: The skeptic in me thinks, you know, we see a lot of these senders and the industry like. Trying to say like, how can I game this? How can I make this work to my advantage? And the skeptic in me is like, is somebody burying this stuff in like invisible text, like 60% sale?
Because I know you’re gonna open it when the AI pulls out this like really good offer. And maybe you’re gonna still wanna click through. And so I’m kind of curious like. Are senders going to try to take advantage of these like, kind of mangled summaries. Like, can I do the most compelling thing that people are gonna click on, even if it’s irrelevant?
We have been saying some of the same things for the past, you know, 175 years, Al, like you pointed out, we, each of us has been in the industry a long time and I feel like we often repeat ourselves, which is like, tell the truth, send things people wanna get. And the senders are often like.
Okay, I hear you, but what if I do this other crazy thing that gets really a lot of clicks? I saw somebody yesterday asking like how can I, you know, get my mail to the promotions tab? I’m using some tool that promises to do that, and I’m like, why? Why is that your goal? You can’t even measure if it’s working.
And also the best part was step two of that tool’s effectiveness was like. By following best practices, you get into the inbox and I was like, you don’t need to go pay for their AI inbox script for that. You just follow the best practices and get there. I just saved you like a thousand bucks.
You’re welcome.
[00:10:11] Al Iverson: I bet Allison, if we did a split screen and we went on LinkedIn right now, we could probably find five fake nonsense influencers who have like this magic formula, like, just add this code and we guarantee that we’ll be able to guide what the AI says or which tab you go into.
That’s another upside of having been around forever. Every year there’s some new group of weirdos who fall from the sky and make this stuff up and say like, we’ve got the secret codes that are gonna get you to the inbox. And they’re either. Absolutely full of beans, just totally lying, completely wrong.
Or they’re in this arms race kind of stuff where like they found some hack that exploits something today, but you’re making Gmail mad and it ain’t gonna work tomorrow and it’s probably gonna get you blocked or otherwise in trouble too. So that’s my other guidance on top of like what you said, like people are saying, like telling people to do secret ways to try to hack the system.
Don’t hack the system. If you’re in it for the long term it’s nothing but trouble. It’s an arms race. Do you wanna spend all of that time and effort trying to fight google ’cause they got more resources than you do.
[00:11:19] Alison Gootee: And they know everything. They know, they saw you Googling how to beat the promo tab.
[00:11:27] Jonathan “JT” Torres: It is definitely one of those things like that. I’ve always, as long as there’s been email, I’m sure that there’s been the people that are like, okay, what’s the quick, easy way to do this instead of putting in the work? And I think that’s definitely a thing that we talk about on the podcast all the time, you know?
If you’ve listened for any amount of time, you’ve heard us talk about it, where there’s no easy button, there’s no magic wand that’s gonna fix it. Like you have to put in the work and this is no different, there’s no magic formula that’s gonna do it for you. And I think there’s definitely
tools and things that people can pay attention to. And I think we’ve touched a little bit on that kind of stuff already. I think one of the key things is bringing it back around to the, not everybody wants this is, you know, people have been freaked out trying to put in the magic formula behind the scenes that’s gonna, you know, give them the magic script that’s gonna put in the perfect line that’s gonna summarize or, you know, call attention to that email.
But there isn’t any of that. Make sure your email is good with content. Don’t skip on the pre-header text, like that’s still like, you know, that’ll give you that summary because some people are still gonna utilize that. So, you know, it’s not completely gone, it’s not completely unimportant. That is something that’s still there.
And yeah and I think that brings up something that we didn’t talk about beforehand, but I feel like it’s still like a good topic to kind of touch on is how many people are actually going out and pinging themselves, their friend groups, their, you know, people around them to see how they’re actually utilizing these things.
Because I’m also one of them too. I don’t like the auto organizing stuff.
Gmail tabs off for me. I don’t like it. Apple, I have an iPhone. I use Apple mail. It separated everything all in tabs.
[00:12:55] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: All mail.
[00:12:56] Jonathan “JT” Torres: I’m like, Yeah.
[00:12:57] Alison Gootee: Nope.
[00:12:57] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Cool. I’m scrolling right over to the all mail for all mail boxes is all mail.
Like, just gimme everything in timeline order. Yeah. Like I just, that’s what I wanna see. So what is everybody doing? Like, are they actually asking their peers, asking the people that are there, asking their consumers to see how they’re utilizing things and then that way that informs them about what they, you know, should focus on.
[00:13:15] Alison Gootee: J-T-T-T-T. I agree with everything that you said so much. I saw somebody coincidentally on LinkedIn yesterday saying like, oh, I’m gonna start increasing my frequency and sending three times a week instead of once. And you know, what’s the safest way to do that? And it’s like, did you, did anyone say they want that?
Because like, why are you spending time guessing at like, what’s the most amount of email that my audience could handle? Because you’re gonna turn off so many people in the process. Why not? It’s a conversation. It’s a two way street. Send ’em an email and say, I’m thinking about increasing frequency. Do you want in or are you happy with once a week?
I think there is this, like the senders know the truth and they’re like a little bit scared of it because the fact that they’re not willing to ask indicates they know exactly what’s gonna happen. I’m sure you’ve all heard it before when you say, Hey, you need to send a Send Reengagement campaign.
And they’re like, well, no one’s gonna click it. And you’re like, well, that’s what I’m saying is no one wants your email. So like we’re coming at this from the same side here, which is you should only send to the people who want it, and there’s this little gambling streak in so many senders where they’re like, I’m just gonna put my money in the slot machine one more time and see what happens.
But they’re not thinking about all the money that they’re missing while they’re trying to do that. So, to your point about asking, I really wish more senders would ask, especially to AL’S point, if they’re gonna look to newsletters, newsletter writers and things, and try to create this content that is really compelling.
Stop guessing that what people think is compelling, measure what you’ve done before and come right out and ask them. I don’t think there’s any need to be like coy about the email you’re sending when we all know, like every email you send is basically a thinly disguised, like, give us your money.
I know that’s what you want, so you should at least gimme some value. And same with some of the accessibility changes that are coming up where it’s like, be sure you’re writing for a screen reader. Be sure you’re using markup that makes things easier to read. I think a lot of senders have this kind of sentiment that’s like, whew, that’s a lot of work to put into one email.
And it’s like, yeah, but you want something from me. And so that’s, it’s this exchange of time and value where it’s like, you want me to invest in your emails? I’m not gonna invest more than you are investing. And them, they’re yours.
[00:15:21] Eric Trinidad: Have you seen it for a while, Al like as, as long as we’ve been in the business, right?
Like, has that changed over time? Like, putting in less amount of effort to get the most gain has people’s like, you know, have they always been that way or has it like in the past it was super easy just to send out an email and get, you know, and get people’s money. What do you think?
[00:15:40] Al Iverson: Sending definitely was a lot lazier for email marketers in, you know, like 1999 and 2000. It was such a different environment though, where, because the inbox was like this wild west, like there’s like an screenshot of an old AOL inbox floating around and on and all of this weird kind of gross, disgusting spam in it.
Half of it is adult content, half of it is pills or, and all this other stuff blocking spam in the late nineties was so hard that these people just sort of set up shop to send tons of garbage spam with no limits. So at first, all of these, like enforcement efforts were focused on the real bad guys.
And so email marketers had an easy time of it. Somebody’s gonna get mad at me for saying that, but relatively had an easy time of it as far as like spam enforcement goes because there was people there was the things like people would send out spam, like advertising, animal abuse videos.
It’s just disgusting. And this stuff would get through, and so people were less worried about legitimate 20% occupants were but also some people would make assumptions and say, oh these people are sending millions of spams and must be okay. I must be able to do the same. And that’s actually sort of what led to my career in deliverability I was approached by an e-commerce provider in Minnesota who did mostly software downloads for big companies.
Like, Symantec, way back when, in the day when Norton was the big deal. And they would keep getting in trouble ’cause they would just like. We sold software to 3 million people last month. Let’s email them all and don’t care about opt-in and don’t care about what you actually bought or which company you bought it from, as with them as a service provider.
So yeah, some people would sort of get into trouble, like just sort of blindly copying what they see other people doing. Bad stuff wise. There wasn’t a lot of strategy then. It was kind of wild to where, like, you know, another sign of hey, you know, you’re old in this industry. If you remember a time when somebody at AOL would actually call me and yell at me for the email that we’re sending, like literally they’d pick up the phone.
The AOL postmaster team, somebody on that team would call me and say, this is garbage. Make it stop.
[00:17:44] Alison Gootee: First they pick up the phone and it’s like, (dial up noises.)
[00:17:47] Eric Trinidad: First they dial, go (rotary phone noises.)
[00:17:52] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Mom get off the computer.
[00:17:54] Alison Gootee: I think you bring up a good point, which is like this arms race, but it’s also a race to the bottom where there’s a lot of that like, oh, I saw this other brand doing this thing, and it may have even been a good idea at one point for this other brand. But if you got that email, probably your audience may have gotten it too.
And so I think there is a big need for people to be a lot more creative and maybe even exercise a little bit more restraint because it may have gotten more difficult to send, but you can still very quickly, like blast, you know, millions of emails that maybe people do not want that much. And so I kind of hope that senders will be a little bit more like deliberate and intentional not to bring like that hippie dippy self-improvement language.
But like, you know, I’m going to invest time and you’re investing time too, and maybe I don’t need to hear from you every day. Like, you know, there are some companies that I really enjoy, but I don’t need to buy from them every day and I don’t even need to hear from them every day. Like, I’m not buying haircare every single day.
I don’t have that much hair. And I have way too full cabinets. So I think there’s just not a lot of like, big picture thinking about like, what is this experience actually like for the end user? And I really hope that people start to think about that, especially when, you know, whatever effort they do put in might just be boiled down to that really small summary.
Like, is this worth anyone’s time?
[00:19:13] Al Iverson: So is there like a minimum amount of hair you need to have to buy more? Haircare.
[00:19:18] Alison Gootee: I mean, some hair. My hair’s like four inches long, probably more than that. It takes me forever. Every time I go, my lady’s like, do you need product? And I’m like, girl, I’m working on my 2024 shampoo still.
I’m good.
[00:19:30] Al Iverson: So I’m thinking about like you, you were talking about watching what other people are doing and don’t assume that because you see somebody else doing something that it’s working for them, right?
[00:19:38] Alison Gootee: Yes.
[00:19:38] Al Iverson: Who lives in a big city where they steal catalytic converters? I do. I live in Chicago.
Unfortunately, it happens, right? There’s people that go around in the middle of the night, even when it’s zero degrees out and when rip the catalytic converters off the bottom of your car. And I saw this article, this is like maybe a year or two ago now, where this dude was caught with like 300 catalytic
converters in his garage. And I was just sort of thinking, okay, well first off, people are stealing a lot of catalytic converters. Does it make good business sense for me to start doing it too? ’cause I can see that he’s doing that.
[00:20:08] Alison Gootee: Just go steal em from this guy. He’s got 300 go get em.
[00:20:11] Al Iverson: Well, that’s the other thing is like from catalytic converters 1 through 299. He thought he was doing pretty good. Yeah. After he got arrested with number 300, it was like, whoops. You thought that was a business model. It’s not really a solid business model. So I see.
I get that a lot of like, just because somebody hasn’t gotten spanked yet. Do not assume that they are actually long-term successful.
[00:20:32] Alison Gootee: Well, and I mean, even in a lot of like deliverability, rehabilitation you know, conversations with senders, they’ll say, well, you’re telling me not to do X, Y, Z thing, but I see other big brand do it all the time.
And it’s like, well, one, you’re not them. Like, I’ve never heard of you and I’ve heard of those guys, so I don’t think you can get away with everything they can. They have like a different reputation to skate on and not just like Gmail thinks more highly of them, but you as a recipient may be more forgiving of a brand that you know is bigger and more established and like you give them a little bit more leeway.
But also all you’re seeing is what they’re sending. You’re not seeing their results, you’re not seeing their spam trap hits their complaints, their engagement, any of the things that happened after that. You’re just seeing the big flashy part and not the fallout. So, be careful.
[00:21:14] Al Iverson: The spam house listing that happened on Thanksgiving when, right, like you’re not seeing the part where the big box store called me on Thanksgiving because they got listed on Spamhaus and in, gee, what happens right after Thanksgiving that might be important for email marketing. So you’re right. They don’t always see the struggles that other people are going through.
[00:21:34] Eric Trinidad: The old, the grass is always greener, right?
[00:21:36] Jonathan “JT” Torres: The unfortunate part, I think, is that there are some of those companies that are doing things that, you know, advertising that easy fix, you know, and that’s the kind of people that will easily fall into that trap, I think a lot of times is you know, they see it they believe that it’s out there, they start hearing it, they start getting those ads on LinkedIn and then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, well, you know, I saw that they’re doing something similar, so lemme try this, you know, through this other company.
And, you know, somebody’s always gonna be selling that snake oil. So, you gotta pay attention, you gotta do what you’re gonna do. Hopefully we’re reaching people out there that are, you know, maybe tempted by that stuff. You know, if not us, I know there’s other blogs and there’s other things out there that are constantly at, you know, talking to people saying like, Hey,
don’t fall into that trap. Don’t do those things. And you know, to add to that, like, don’t do those things, don’t fall into those traps because it can be much more dangerous for those that are, you know, not in that same space. Like, you were mentioning Alison, it’s not the same, it’s not equal for everybody and
if you get into trouble, like we’ve seen it, this is just coming from my experience and I’m sure everybody here can talk to that, like when you get in trouble as a, you know, depending on where you’re at and depending on your reputation, depending on where you sat, like you can get in much deeper trouble for much longer.
You know, I think is the way that I would state that. Like, it’s just not easy to climb outta those holes once you sink into those. So, just a heads up. We just wanna throw that out there and, you know, pile on. I’m sure people have talked about it, I know people have talked about it, but we want to add to that to say, you know, call it out here as a thing.
And especially in this day and age where, you know, I think as the artificial intelligence of things starts getting better, like machine learning has been a thing for a very long time. Inbox providers use that information and have done a lot of things to get really good at doing automation into what’s being blocked, what’s being found as spam, what people don’t like to see.
And you know, this is just an add-on to that, you know, like we see AI as the new version of that, the new increase of that, like the way that it is now being done and it’s just gonna make the whole thing better and they’re gonna get better right now might not be great. They’re probably still refining a lot of it, but hey it’s gonna get to a day where they’re gonna be able to pick that stuff out much easier and you think, Hey, I’m safe.
I’ve been doing it the same way. I haven’t had to do X, Y, and Z. Cool. That is gonna change. You know, like all the senders we talk about that are like, I haven’t changed in 10 years. It’s going fine. It’s like, okay, cool.
[00:23:49] Alison Gootee: It’s time to change.
[00:23:50] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Why are we talking now then?
[00:23:52] Alison Gootee: Yeah. Actually Al, I had written a piece for your blog spam resource.
About some of the common sender excuses and kind of debunking that. And that was one of ’em was we haven’t changed anything. And it was like, okay, well maybe it’s time. You don’t just get to keep down that same path forever. I also think it’s interesting like talking about earlier as like apple surfacing of phishing emails being important. The AI is missing a lot of context. Like it’s not wrong. It is important, like a phishing attempt is super important. But that doesn’t mean I like, it’s good that you should surface it as like the first thing that you should open. And so I am hoping that like over time as it begins to learn more, it’ll get that context right because it’s not wrong.
That is important, but like, that’s not what we meant. We need you to go hide that. It’s not supposed to be surfaced. When we were chatting before the show, Al made a comment about email not being a birthright. And I think that’s such a good point because I think a lot of senders get this in their heads.
Like, I’m doing all this email in the mailbox provider isn’t helping me. I’d like to kind of have them take a step back and it’s like, okay, but why would they help you? Like. They are a business that exists to make money and you are not their customer. You are not paying them anything. So what is in it for them to help you get your email into the inbox?
And I think a lot of people who even send email every day have never done that calculation of. Oh crap, like Gmail doesn’t actually owe me inbox placement. Gmail doesn’t owe me anything at all. I’m playing on their rules. I’m trying to make money off of their channel. The least I could do is be a respectful, like citizen of their network.
[00:25:23] Al Iverson: And Gmail doesn’t hate you, Yahoo doesn’t hate you.
[00:25:26] Alison Gootee: They might.
[00:25:26] Al Iverson: Microsoft doesn’t hate you. I mean maybe not you Allison, but they like the rest of us. No. The point being that they have real threats to deal with and you’re barely in the top 10. Like you’re sending a lot of email marketing that, that, that’s fine.
Maybe it’s annoying people. Maybe it’s low value, maybe it’s high value, but you’re not ultimately the bad guy if you’re just sending normal emails. The real problem is the stuff that we don’t see that they’re fighting all the time. Phishing and spoofing and malware. They, you know, Microsoft, years ago, Microsoft would tell me that 98% of the mail attempted to hand off to them was a virus or a scam, or a phish, like 98%.
So like literally already, the vast majority of the stuff that comes to the edge that tries to come into their servers is scary bad stuff is not just like. Oh, we emailed our list four times today, but it might be opt-ins, it might be low value, but no, it’s really literally, ultimately scary stuff. So that’s the other thing that I think that email marketers forget is that mailbox providers, they got other stuff to do.
It’s not just you that they’re dealing with. They have actual real threats. Like they’re worried about people actually stealing grandma’s money. Like that literally still happens. Literally is still a problem. There’s some wild stat that’s one of those ones that everybody quotes and you wonder if it’s baloney or not, but it’s, they say that 90% of hacks start with an email, like a phishing email, a spoofing email or some sort of, you know, attempt to trick somebody in the clicking on something that they shouldn’t click on.
Always coming through messaging, right? There’s growth in some of that stuff with like. Vishing and smishing, right? For SMS or even voice fake stuff now, but at the core, like messaging is a vector for bad attacks. So remember, like mailbox providers are trying to protect against far more than just your marketing messages.
They don’t hate you, man. They’ve got bigger fish to fry.
[00:27:20] Alison Gootee: They don’t even see you. But if you are busy spending your time thinking like, how can I act my way into the inbox? Guess who else is doing stuff like that, the bad guy. So if you’re trying to inject these like corny little codes into your thing to help you get into the primary tab.
You probably look more like a spammer than you do like a reasonable marketer. And so I think that’s something to keep in mind. We say a lot like, look like a spammer, get treated like spam. And I think a lot of people don’t know what that means. They’re like, oh, but my CTA is in a red button, so I’m good to go.
And it’s like, that’s not what I meant. I’m like, what are your overall practices and how shady are they really?
[00:27:55] Al Iverson: And are you doing something that is gonna make them notice you? It’s not always good to be noticed. You don’t want our good friend at Yahoo to suddenly start noticing your email because her goal is blocking bad email.
So if you’re suddenly on her radar, that is not a good sign.
[00:28:12] Alison Gootee: Yeah. It’s true .Well a lot to think about there as far as other AI stuff kind of branching out from that, but ways to stand out in the inbox. I know that BIMI has gotten to be a big topic and Al, you’ve done some really cool research. Would you mind bringing us in on like some of your latest BIMI findings and maybe even how we can recognize BIMI or not BIMI in the inbox?
[00:28:34] Al Iverson: So what the hell is BIMI? It’s kind of a, it’s a fun thing to talk about because it’s an actual positive inbox thing instead of all this negative stuff about like, don’t do this, don’t do that, or we’ll kill you. So BIMI is brand indicators for message identification. It is a mouthful, but it, what it means is it’s a logo that shows up in the inbox.
And Alison, to your point, there are other ways that logos can show in or next to the inbox that have come and go over the years. There’s a few of those. And so, BIMI is an attempt to sort of come next level some of that stuff. In history, historically, there’s a few different ways logos could show in the inbox.
There’s this thing called Gravitar, which is basically where your logo shows in WordPress. WordPress is the big adopter of that, but Gravitar, they tried to make it work for email for a while and there’s a plugin for Thunderbird and some other stuff where it’ll actually show sender logo.
Kind of a neat idea. It kind of hearkens back. There was even older, like an RLE encoded little header. You could put in emails that would show somebody’s face and some email clients. But it is never really got adopted by brands or adopted broadly. Then there’s Yahoo has a sort of a legacy sender logo.
You use Yahoo Mail and you get email there, you’ll see some brands have a logo. Those are not all BIMI logos. Yahoo’s got an internal database. It works okay, but it’s kind of on Yahoo to notice you, to try to figure out what logo to put there. It doesn’t always show the right one. They don’t know to update it if you change your branding same deal with the Google profile picture or similar deal.
You can go in and you can create a Google account for any email address. It doesn’t even have to be a Gmail address, and you can put a picture for that. I do that. For spam resource, it’s kind of fun actually. You can even do a gif and make it animated. Problem is it’s Gmail only and how broadly it shows varies.
Like it’s not gonna show to the whole world. And because Google wants you to look at BIMI for future logos for brands, they’re probably not going to support this as a broad logo format for bulk senders forever. It’s very easy for them to tell bulk senders versus not.
[00:30:39] Alison Gootee: Is it tab specific for it to show in Gmail?
[00:30:42] Al Iverson: No. There’s a different one. There’s a schema one in Gmail that you can do, and then that one is tab specific that I keep. I haven’t figured out how that, how you code that exactly. I’m gonna try that ’cause it’s just so I can learn it. But Gmail there the Google profile one, you just create an account and it’s in your account, sort of avatar, your profile picture settings.
Then there’s this one called Microsoft Brand Cards, and that’s where you remember. You might still see it. Like I sometimes you’ll see a logo in in the Microsoft outlook.com inbox, and you’ll go, wait a minute. Where did this come from? ’cause Microsoft does not support BIMI. They don’t have any other
logo standard that they talk about, there’s no way to sign up for anything like that. Well, this they had this one historically it was called Microsoft Brand Cards. And so you could sort of set up a brand card and one of the components of the brand card would show a logo in the inbox. Unfortunately, that’s dead.
It seemed like it was sort of one, one guy at Microsoft liked it and then quit and they shut it down. And then Apple Business Connect is the last. One of those, that’s sort of an alternate way to do a logo. Apple Business Connect is pretty cool and you should potentially do it even if you’re also doing BIMI.
They really make sense for them to go together because Apple and business Connect the logo will show up in more places than just email. It’s great for like, if you gotta think of, retailers with a bunch of locations. Think of like Walgreens, right? Walgreens is the perfect use case for it.
You want a Walgreens logo to show up for every time that they’re you look them up on, on Apple Maps or you’re getting a text from them. They’re still figuring out the details of how it might work in RCS and stuff like that. But it works for email and you do it with BIMI in a lot of cases if you’re smart, because BIMI will cover Gmail and Yahoo and then Apple Business Connect will cover Apple. And there’s some interoperability confusion around BIMI too, especially on Apple devices. Like, like a BIMI logo will show on your iPhone only in your iCloud account in Apple mail, which is like, well, Gmail supports BIMI and I use Gmail in Apple mail. Why doesn’t the logo show.
’cause they don’t trust each other enough to pass those signals back and forth.
[00:32:50] Alison Gootee: Ouch. Let that be a lesson to you as a sender. Apple and Gmail don’t trust each other. You’ve got a long road to go.
[00:32:59] Al Iverson: So logos are cool though. If you can figure out a way to do a logo, you definitely should because it drives engagement. Now, this is one of those things where going all the way back to when Yahoo was owned by Verizon and they started this whole thing in like 2018 ish and they did a test and they saw something like an up to a 10% boost in engagement. So opens interactions, clicks. Now we see that too.
Actually. We got a white paper we’re gonna post that we did with a really good test with a multi-branded client. At Valimail that shows the boost in engagement you get from a BIMI logo. At some point there’s sort of a trade off because if everybody does BIMI logos, then it’s not so much that you’re gonna get more opens, but it’s gonna be more like if you don’t do the logo, you’re gonna miss out on the trust that comes with that.
People are not gonna trust your emails, so we still got ways to go. Like, if you look at I track BIMI adoption rates in the top 10 million domains. There’s all these data sets online where you can go and say, like, gimme the top 10 million domains. CloudFlare also has a dashboard with a, with like the top 1 million and other stuff like that.
It’s kind of fun because DNS. Is all public and BIMI is a record in DNS, so anybody can write a script and set it up to query periodically and build snapshot data and reporting to show how broadly is some public technology like BIMI being adopted. So that’s what I do. I take this 10 million domains record set, and every month or two I look to see.
For in, in all of those D domains, are there BIMI DNS records, do they link to a logo and do they link to a certificate file, which is this verified mark certificate or common mark certificate? It’s a verification cert that you buy from a cert authority to prove that you are who you say you are and we look at that and it can build little charts. And so I can see now like there’s somewhere around 30,000 domains in that top 10 million that have a BIMI logo. It’s not a ton, but that’s about double what it was about just over two years ago, almost two and a half years ago. So it is growing and it’s, right now the adoption is low enough.
Overall that you kind of get a leg up if you implement a BIMI logo. Some industries are actually pretty smart and have adopted it more than others. Retailers tend to be some of the first ones to do a BIMI logo, but yeah it’s been a lot of fun to try to figure out like what’s the right way to help people
set up a BIMI logo, is it worth the value? How do you measure that value? It’s kind of tricky to even do like AB testing and stuff like that with it.
[00:35:25] Alison Gootee: Yeah, I mean I would with all that stuff, I think it’s hard obviously to like correlate the exact uptick in engagement specifically to BIMI, but it sounds like it certainly doesn’t hurt.
I’m also a little bit curious if adoption grows, are there gonna be some of those like disruptors who are like, I’m never doing BIMI ’cause then I stand out in the inbox. ’cause I’m the only one who doesn’t have it, so I’m curious.
[00:35:46] Eric Trinidad: It’s gonna start going the other way.
[00:35:48] Alison Gootee: Yeah, exactly.
[00:35:49] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: They’re disrupting themselves.
[00:35:51] Alison Gootee: Yeah, of course.
[00:35:54] Jonathan “JT” Torres: Yeah. And it’s one of those things where like, yeah, it’s a nice thing to see and still feels like there is that trust factor. Like, anyone that I’ve seen, that I’ve talked to about it, like it definitely feels better when it has that logo on there.
I know we’ve had this conversation in the past but just to bring it up here again, it’s like you do have to evaluate is a business.
I think there’s still, because of that verified mark, like, is it worth it? Am I putting stuff out there that is brandable that I can put as my logo, that’s gonna be, you know, consistent, not gonna be changing every year like that people will identify as my brand. And I think that’s why retailers, you know, can definitely pick it up and run with it, because that’s where most of them are.
But I think it’s definitely expanding to a lot of different stuff and I mean, I know I like to see it whenever I get something in the inbox that has it, that has that branding on there. You know, for whatever reason it, you know, whether it’s one of the old ones or the Apple Business Connect or the BIMI stuff.
Like, it’s definitely a good thing to have and to start thinking about for those that haven’t started thinking about it, because it’s not gonna be a, lemme just push this button and it’s done. There’s a lot that goes into it.
[00:36:49] Al Iverson: Whenever you see either a BIMI logo or an Apple Business Connect logo, for that to show up, they have to have implemented DMARC and they have to implement it at enforcement, meaning they’re telling the world all of their email authenticates. So if you don’t authenticate all your mail, and if you don’t set up DMARC to say, Hey, reject mail or quarantine mail that fails, those checks you, you don’t get a sender logo. So anytime that shows up, that’s a little bit
to your point, JT kind of a boost in trust.
[00:37:15] Eric Trinidad: Mm-hmm. So you’re not gaming the system, you’re actually following best practices and you get, you know, that little topper right there. That’s nice. I know our neighbor to the north Matt Vernhout, ears are probably ringing right now because as we talk about this.
So all good things. All good things, Matt. Well, right on. I know we’re coming up to time here. We’ve covered a few things. Al I know that we can probably talk for hours on end. I hope to have you back soon. you know, if that’s cool, you know, definitely the invite’s always out there for you to come back and talk with us about email anytime.
[00:37:47] Al Iverson: Thank you, Eric. This is a lot of fun and yeah, I’d be happy to come back and chat with you guys again.
[00:37:51] Eric Trinidad: Well, right on. Well, if anybody wants to see anything that you’ve talked about or things that you’ve posted where can they find you at?
[00:37:58] Al Iverson: Spamresource.com is my blog where I’ve been writing about email deliverability since 2000 or 2001.
It’s been a while, but also valimail.com. That’s the DMARC provider. That’s my day job today and my role in that sort of community and engagement. I have this weird title. I don’t know what it is. I do stuff, I do weird stuff with data. I do weird stuff with community. I do a little bit of industry stuff.
My goal is sort of to help people understand why DMARC is useful and how it actually helps you protect your email domain. So that’s what I do. I help do a little bit of, you know, a client will come and say, Hey, we’re gonna stand up, new infrastructure what’s the right way to do IP warming? So I’ll do a little bit of deliverability consulting, but really the goal here is to help people understand how to secure their domains.
Help ’em understand the gospel of DMARC.
[00:38:43] Eric Trinidad: Nice.
[00:38:43] Alison Gootee: Hallelujah.
[00:38:44] Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Well, appreciate you being a good citizen of the internet and also helping others be a good citizens as well. Right on.
[00:38:51] Alison Gootee: That’s true.
[00:38:52] Eric Trinidad: And Allison where can people find you at?
[00:38:54] Alison Gootee: You can just find me on LinkedIn, Alison Gootie.
I also have a blog series here on our Mailgun blog called The Bounce House with Allison Gootie. So highly recommend checking that out. I also want to give Al a double shout out for his blog spamresource. He already mentioned it. If you are having a deliverability problem, chances are he’s blogged about it, and if he hasn’t he is very open to requests and would probably blog about something at your request if you are stuck. So, definitely check him out. He’s one of my go-tos, if not the foremost go-to
[00:39:21] Eric Trinidad: Oh, 110%. I utilize Al on the daily even if he doesn’t know it, so I appreciate you. And you’re doing the Lords work.
[00:39:29] Alison Gootee: He’s like, is a bot hitting my site? And you’re like, sorry, that was me.
[00:39:32] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: It’s just Eric.
[00:39:35] Eric Trinidad: Right on. And Thomas, if they want to see more about what we got going on, where can they find us here?
[00:39:40] Thomas “T-Bird” Knierien: Yeah, you can find us over at mailgun.com/resources/podcasts. This will be on there along with links to Al’s blogs, spamresource.com,
also along with Allison’s upcoming blog that’s coming out this month for the Bounce House as well. And then also you can watch this podcast and see our amazing, beautiful faces over at youtube.com/@mailgun And yeah, we’re kicking off the year. We’re super excited to be back and we got ton more episodes coming your way.
[00:40:09] Eric Trinidad: Awesome, awesome. Well thanks again, everybody. Appreciate y’all, appreciate your time and until next time, be good to yourselves and each other.
