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Where we’re going, we don’t need spam

Email’s Not Dead: Season 1, Episode 3

Where we’re going, we don’t need spam

Email's Not Dead

About this episode:

We’re looking to the future, so we brought in Mailgun’s Nostradamus (aka our in-house deliverability engineer Nick Schafer). He brings us a ton of insight on what the future of spam holds, especially for the concepts of no authentication, no entry, and DMARC. Let’s hope for hoverboards, hover cars, and one day — no spam!

Meet your presenters

Jonathan Torres

Jonathan Torres

Manager of the TAM team at Sinch Mailgun

Eric Trinidad

Eric Trinidad

Technical Account Manager II at Sinch Mailgun

Nick Schafer

Nick Schafer

Sr. Manager of Deliverability and Compliance at Sinch Mailgun

transcript

Email’s Not Dead – S1, E3: Where we’re going, we don’t need spam

Overview

00:00:05

Eric Trinidad: Welcome, everybody, to Emails Not Dead. My name is Eric, and with me is my hetero life mate. Jonathan.

00:00:11

Jonathan Torres: How's it going?

00:00:12

Eric Trinidad: You're here with us joining us on our final leg of our spam journey of finding out what is the future of spam. We've seen where it is. We've seen where it's become and now what's next? What do we have to look forward to? Hopefully, we're going to answer some of that today. We have what is a very special guest, our deliverability daddy, Nick Schafer. How are you today, sir?

00:00:37

Nick Schafer: I'm good. I'm good. Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this podcast with yall, so.

00:00:42

Jonathan Torres: Yes!

00:00:42

Eric Trinidad: Right on, man. Right on. I know we've been talking about it for a while, so it's good to have you. You know, I think we should start us off on a little bit of your background. Where are you coming from? What you do? How are you doing?

00:00:54

Nick Schafer: I was born into email. No, I'm kidding. Just like everyone else kind of in this industry, you kind of just fall into it. My background was not in email. I was an athlete. I played baseball all throughout college. I had aspirations of continuing that didn't work out for me. And then I started off as a graphic designer and then fell into email. I went to work at Rackspace where they acquired Mailgun, jumped on board that train. I've been with Mailgun ever since and learn everything I can about email.

00:01:27

Eric Trinidad: Right on. Right on. Just taking it all in. Jon, your background was in email, right?

00:01:31

Jonathan Torres: No, no, no. Not at all.

00:01:33

Nick Schafer: You weren't you weren't born into it.

00:01:34

Jonathan Torres: No, no. I wish it would have been like, you know, coming out, talking email immediately, you know, like first words were your "spam message." You know?

00:01:45

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, I did. I heard you always had a potty mouth. So it would be a spam message that you said first.

00:01:48

Jonathan Torres: Exactly the point. So I kind of wanted to get into a part of that and just to kind of find out, you know, a little bit who you are and kind of where you came from. But you told us a story the other day that I think I feel like... I want to imagine this is where you got your start into what you know in email is good and bad and everything else. But if you can share that story, man, that horror story, if you will.

00:02:14

Nick Schafer: Yeah, this isn't a good story. This was my eye-opening event of the bad stuff that happens with email. So, yeah, I was in college and my mom sent me a message, an email message. And, you know, coming from your mom, you think it's, you know, trustworthy. I didn't know anything about email headers or anything back in that day. So, yeah, I just clicked on it happened to be a paypal message, put all my credentials in. And, you know, a couple of days later, I see all my money gone from my bank account and it's being used in Romania. That was my intro to the dark side of email. You know, obviously, with that, I fell for a phishing attempt. Again, it came from my mom. I thought it was a little more trustworthy. I should have looked further into it. But, yeah, ever since then, I've kind of been cautious of emails that I click on. It was not fun, you know, going to the police department in Abilene, Texas, and having to file a report and get all that started. That was definitely not fun.

00:03:17

Jonathan Torres: I love what you told us the other day about, like, you having to sign something. I can't remember what exactly it said.

00:03:22

Nick Schafer: Yeah, no, they literally gave me, like, a piece of paper that said I would be careful on, like, the emails that I click on. I thought that was pretty funny. But apparently, since they had that sheet of paper, I was not the first.

00:03:36

Eric Trinidad: Wow.

00:03:37

Jonathan Torres: Nor would you be the last, I'm sure.

00:03:39

Eric Trinidad: Absolutely scared straight. You never clicked on a spam message up until this day. You've been good.

00:03:44

Nick Schafer: I have not fallen victim to phish since that time. That's good. And there's a lot of phish out there. So that counts for something.

00:03:51

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Heck yeah. Yeah, definitely. I feel like we just need to, like, make copies of that sheet of paper that’s signing you not to do it and just send it out everywhere and everyone at all times. It's crazy. I'm like I know it's just one of those funny things because I feel that moms just do that kind of stuff sometimes, like I'm just going to call out my mom right here right now, because there's plenty of times where it's like I'm just, you know, casually browsing around on my phone, like I get a notification from Facebook and it's my mom, like setting me like one hundred dollar free Walmart gift card. And I'm like, no, mom, it's like, why are you doing this? Not like it's an ever-growing battle because so many people are so good at through all mediums and all channels, whether it's email, whether it's, you know, stuff on Facebook or Instagram or whatever, like scamming people and doing a really good job at it, especially in the mom market. I think that's what it should be called.

00:04:42

Nick Schafer: Yeah, I have to say, I have the same stories with my mother besides the fish email that I just talked about, elderly, you know, non-millennials, whatever you want to call them. Like, those are definitely the targets.

00:04:55

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Oh yeah. One hundred and ten percent. So, I mean, we're kind of getting into the future of spam and spamming and all these different mediums, like if we keep going on the current path. And things continue on down the line on how this is looking and what it is like right now, do you see it getting any better or any worse, like within the next five years? Like, what does that look like? I mean, if we want to take a look at the dark side of things, does that look really grim?

00:05:18

Nick Schafer: Yeah. I mean, if there weren't people that were, you know, fighting the good fight and, you know, coming out with new, you know, authentication measures or things like that, then, you know, the future of email would be really dark because you would log in to your mailbox and just be inundated with, you know, spam, phish, all kinds of malicious things. But I mean, you could really look back to, i've seen this image floating around. I know you have to, Jon, because we use it in one of our onboarding presentations. But it's a picture of a Hotmail mailbox like early days, whenever like Hotmail was first released, and it was just nothing but spam.

00:05:53

Jonathan Torres: Yeah.

00:05:53

Nick Schafer: That was in the inbox. It wasn't, that wasn't like in the spam folder. Like it was just all the messages in the inbox because filtering technologies weren't really advanced at that time. So yes, it could get really dark. But, you know, there are, you know, a lot of good people that are, you know, coming up with new ideas. You know, there's working groups that... that put together new pieces that really helped to protect end users. So, you know, honestly, I think we'll be fine. What that means, though, is it could get pretty difficult for senders to get messages delivered because as filters get more and more complex, you know, they could get things wrong from time to time. Yeah. I mean, I know I've seen very legitimate senders get messages filtered by, you know, I think I've seen one case where, you know, Microsoft was filtering their own messages. Like there's other cases like that. It just it's whenever you make complexities or introduce more complexity to filters, there's going to be false positives.

00:06:57

Eric Trinidad: While we're getting into this. And while you're explaining all of this, like I called you the deliverability daddy at the beginning, not a lot of people know what that means other than maybe a few in here. Here in the room.

00:07:08

Nick Schafer: I have a lot of nicknames here around the office. Deliverability daddy, that is one of them that I hear frequently.

00:07:13

Jonathan Torres: That’s our favorite, though, that's why.

00:07:15

Eric Trinidad: So, like, can you tell us like what exactly... like what your role is with Mailgun and what you see on the daily?

00:07:24

Nick Schafer: Yeah. So, you know, just a second ago I mentioned people fighting the good fight. I like to consider myself one of those people fighting the good fight. And what that means on the Mailgun side is, you know, making sure our customers are behaving, making sure we're taking care of customers that have poor email practices. You know, they have high bounce rates, high complaint rates, just kind of, you know, taking care of our network, but at the same time helping our good senders that are running into issues, whether that's, you know, talking with them one to one or, you know, working with, you know, a technical account manager that is responsible for a particular customer, you know, just kind of walking through, understanding what possibilities there are that could be impacting their deliverability. You know, there's very many. There's a lot of things that can impact deliverability. So it's not always easy, to be perfectly honest. There's a lot of things that can impact it. And it's there's never just one huge thing glaring out. And it's a bunch of little things that, you know, we just kind of help our customers clean up.

00:08:24

Eric Trinidad: Right on. Well and it's because of all this spam and because of those who have, like, made this a dark, grim place that, you know, we have to we actually have jobs, I think, you know.

00:08:34

Nick Schafer: Yeah!

00:08:36

Eric Trinidad: So, you know, what we try to realize is that it is a grim outlook. And man, we had this utopia of like anybody can send to anybody, and it was awesome. But then, you know, we got to the Wild West and anybody was, like, just appearing as other people trying to get your mom to send you all their phishing messages and so they can get access to your accounts. So where are we going now, like in the next five years? How are we going to get out of this, like it could be. But like, what are some things that can help protect others and help them stand out so we can grow and get different?

00:09:12

Nick Schafer: So I mentioned a second ago, like best practices or I mentioned email practices. No doubt you've heard email best practices before if you're listening to this podcast. So, I mean, that really is the... the thing that is going to help you as a sender to help you stand out from, you know, the bad guys. The thing that I really kind of try to focus on and drive into… to my customers’ minds is the idea of list health. I think everything begins and ends with list health. And whenever I say that, I mean the quality of the addresses in the mailing list that you're sending to. I see it time and time again where customers’ mailing lists just get full of bad addresses. I mean, I can talk about typos, but, you know, it's not even just typos. You know, everyone fat fingers from time to time. You know, you put in, you know, gnail instead of Gmail or something like that. That happens. But there's a lot of other stuff, list bombing is something that, you know, happens all the time and I can see it looking through our logs that, you know, some of our customers don't have protected forms and there's bots out there that will look for those unprotected forms and just hit those forms hard. And what that means is there's a bunch of bad email addresses getting into your list or you are indirectly participating in an attack on someone's mailbox. So there's just a lot of bad stuff that can happen with your email list. And you need to make sure as a sender to put those measures in place. Like I mentioned, typos. People could maliciously put, you know, spam traps in forms like your competitors’ form. I mean, think about them. Say you have a competitor in your same space and, you know, they want to do something against you. They could go in and sign up for your mailing list with some spam traps. Maybe they know some. Obviously, no one knows all spam traps. Right. But that is something that – that could happen. That's definitely one of the biggest things that I try to focus on whenever I help our customers stand out from the bad because mailbox providers see a bunch of bad stuff every day. I was at a conference recently where one of the ISPs was on a session and he just talked about how much spam they get each and every day and how much they're like fighting it. You know, whenever they're fighting against spam at such high levels, you know, there's no doubt people are going to get caught up in it. I understand. Like, the difficulty there is there with that, because, you know, their first job is to protect their end users, their customers, users of those mailboxes that they provide.

00:11:42

Eric Trinidad: So in the end, I mean, at the gates, you know, it's.

00:11:45

Nick Schafer: Yeah, absolutely. You know, as far as, like, other things of how to stand out and not look like a spammer, like, I'll just say it flat out, how do you not look like a spammer? I mean, you know, authentication is obviously extremely important. You know, you need to make sure you're sending your messages with DKIM. You have SPF in place and even to an extent, DMARC, that's getting more and more prevalent. One thing I've heard a lot recently or over the last couple of years is this idea of no off, no injury. I've heard it discussed at conferences and mailing lists, different email groups. So basically the idea is like if your messages aren't authenticated, ISPs or mailbox providers aren't even going to let your messages through the door. They'll just block you at the gateway. The reality is, I haven't seen a lot of that yet, but that doesn't mean it's not going to happen. But yeah, I mean, as a sender, make sure that you're authenticating fully, you know, SPF and DKIM, every sender should be making sure that that's in place. And I think most do. There are obviously legacy mail servers that may not be authenticating and those could be impacted if ISPs do ever make that switch to no off, no entry again, IPv4 for there hasn't really been any cases that I'm aware of where this is in place. But I have heard that O365 will block traffic over the IPv6 base if it is not authenticated with SPF or DKIM. So I mean, that just shows you that it is definitely in the mind as an option.

00:13:17

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. And I mean, in today's landscape, when with technology the way it is, like there's almost no reason to not have authentication that way. And we see other safeguards that are in place like that, too, like places not accepting email that doesn't have an mx record in return for those domains. So, yeah, like it sounds easy. It sounds like it should be something simple and you should do without thinking. But yeah, there are still those cases where that's still a thing. So everybody should be secure on those things.

00:13:43

Nick Schafer: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, like you said, it's something that's easy to do. The reason mailbox providers in my mind haven't done it is because there is a lot of legitimate traffic. Unfortunately, that is still authentic. And like, think about old mail systems. Maybe they were set up like before you find SPF and DKIM were around that time.

00:14:03

Jonathan Torres: I remember those things.

00:14:04

Nick Schafer: That's a possibility. So, yeah.

00:14:07

Jonathan Torres: I've definitely worked for a place that I'm not going to say who. Just like our mail server was just an old school PC computer tower in the closet that was always sending out all our emails. We had a good 100,000 customers that were sending stuff from there, you know, so that's a... fun stuff.

00:14:27

Nick Schafer: So, yeah, I mean, authentication is obviously really important. And I think most senders do a good job on it. Yeah, I mentioned it briefly, DMARC. This kind of leads into something else I kind of want to touch on. So it would be really hard for, like, mailbox providers to say if you don't have DMARC authentication in place, then we're going to reject your messages because DMARC is pretty hard to set up. Jon, I know you've dealt a lot with DMARC and it's not easy, especially for complex organizations that have a lot of different mail streams going through a lot of different third parties. It is a daunting task. I remember when Mailgun had to set up DMARC, you know, we didn't have that much traffic.

00:15:03

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, I wish this was a visual space, because you just...

00:15:06

Jonathan Torres: Your eyes glossed over.

00:15:08

Nick Schafer: It wasn't fun like we had, we had departments that were sending through different third parties. And I remember when we flip the switch to p=reject, we miss some and send messages. We're getting blocked after that.

00:15:21

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. So I think in most cases, like I know because I've worked with, like, even smaller companies that were trying to get it implemented and set up and it's never been like a quick couple of days process. We're like, cool, like let's get this, let's get this done. It's like months a lot of times. And just to make sure you get all those streams, because if you haven't thought about it and you haven't sort of protected yourself at many different levels, it's hard to catch up. You're basically running the clock just to get caught up with everything to be able to do something like that.

00:15:46

Nick Schafer: Yeah, it is not a quick process, it is painful. I've heard really bad horror stories, like, of large companies that have like I don't know if it was hundreds, but it was a lot of different, like, mail streams that they send out. And I mean, just to even think about that, that just scares me.

00:16:07

Jonathan Torres: Oh, goodness.

00:16:08

Nick Schafer: So, like, speaking of DMARC, there actually is this kind of ties back into the no auth, no entry thing. In a way, there is something out there already that requires DMARC, and that is BIMI. I don't know if you've you've heard of it yet, but BIMI is this way for senders to get their logos in, in the messages that they send and you'll probably see it in your mailbox right now in some way, shape or form like where you'll see trusted senders have their logos displayed next to their from addresses. And the mailbox is – for the most part – is probably Google Plus related or Microsoft. They just recently released Microsoft business profiles where you basically verify a business, upload a logo and they'll start showing your logo and, you know, Microsoft users mailboxes. But that's been a while around for a while. But the whole idea of BIMI is to kind of have one piece that kind of works for everyone. You know, the Google Plus thing that's obviously, you know, only for like Gmail users. Microsoft one is only for Microsoft users. BIMI is going to be for everyone and it's going to be this.

00:17:14

Jonathan Torres: Like an all encompassing.

00:17:15

Nick Schafer: Yeah. It's an all encompassing solution. Right now, the only ones I believe that are using it is Yahoo! Or the Verizon Media Group. I guess, as they're they're now known. But I hear them referred to as Verizon Media Group now. But yeah, they're the ones that are kind of testing it out. But yeah, you know, again, big companies like, you have to go through approval processes to make changes to DNS. But, you know, this is something that basically helps your brand out, builds trust with recipients. And the idea and the hope is that, you know, whenever recipients or end users of mailboxes see these messages and they see a logo next to the from address, they can trust it more. So what does that do? That may lead to increased open rates. And we know for a fact that open rates and click rates, you know, engagement rates really help with deliverability. It shows that your messages are wanted, increases your reputation as a sender. So it's good to know that, again, there's people fighting the good fight that are wanting to do the right thing and reward good senders. But yeah, like I mentioned, DMARC is required for BIMI. So you can't, if you're just doing SPF and DKIM like we talked about, you can't get those logos.

00:18:31

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, yeah. And that's stuff is like... it's really good and it's really helpful. I know for someone like me and I'm sure someone like you Nick, who's had bad experiences with things in email and what can you do to trust somebody, how can you start easily, more easily identifying what emails good, what emails bad and have those key indicators saying like OK, cool, like this one has a logo, it's... everything looks good about it. So yes, there should be a legitimate message rather than it just having, you know, a little nice initial next to the name and nothing else identifying with it. And then you've got to really start digging and looking through headers, hovering over links to check stuff. And it's just not as fun, you know. So, yeah, like anything you can do, any little piece of it... like so much.

00:19:11

Nick Schafer: Yeah for sure. I mean, take it back to my story that I started off with. If I was trained to know to look for a PayPal logo on PayPal messages and that message didn't have the logo, I wouldn't have clicked it. Chances are so...

00:19:25

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Yeah, definitely.

00:19:27

Nick Schafer: And you know, another funny thing, I didn't mention what BIMI actually stood for, but there's a lot of acronyms in the email world. I mean you got DKIM, SPF, DMARC, BIMI, ARC. Like it's endless. Yeah but BIMI stands for brand indicator's for message identification. So I mean right there in the acronym itself, it's just trying to help brands to identify with their end users. And I think it's something that – that will help and something I'm, you know, looking forward to seeing the results like I am a data nerd. I like to see, you know, AB test. But I mean, we should be able to get some good data in the future, once you know, this is more established of what senders with BIMI set up get and what senders without BIMI get.

00:20:14

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's awesome. That'll be a fun space to explore. I'm sure you're coming up pretty soon as everybody starts adopting these kind of things. But as far as like, you know, keep moving on with the conversation and I move over to what else like what else are we looking at? You know, under one of the things that we talked about previously was kind of domain reputation and how it's up and coming, especially with certain providers already. See that continuing on in the future.

00:20:40

Nick Schafer: Yeah, absolutely. So I like to think about it like this. You know, we talked earlier about, you know, the old mailbox is like the first hot mailboxes just being inundated with spam. You know, the first way mailbox providers fought this was looking at IP reputation. And that works, you know, somewhat. But the problem is like shared IPs are used so much these days that, you know, you can't really make great filtering decisions off of, you know, IP based reputation if, like, it's shared by thousands of customers. You know, there may be one really bad sender that's using the shared IP that could ruin it for, you know, thousands of other senders. So you mentioned, yeah, it's already being used like domain reputation, I think is just going to get more and more important. I know Gmail, like, really puts a big emphasis on it. You know, I've seen cases where, you know, a sender with a good domain reputation just happens to get put on an IP that was really kind of suffering, that had a bad reputation. Their messages were still getting inboxed. So I think, you know, mailbox providers are going to move more towards that domain reputation model. That's just my hunch. I think IP based reputation will still be used. It... it's just going to be one piece of the pie. Mailbox providers need to take in as much information as they can. And they do, believe me, they look at everything that senders are doing. And one thing I meant to mention earlier that I didn't touch on when we were kind of talking about the future of email, or future of spam is this idea of individualized filtering. There are times where your messages could make it to 99 percent of the users, but maybe, like, you had seed addresses or something and you see your message filtered like it may cause, you know, pause like you're like, oh, gosh, my my campaign just got filtered to spam. But, you know, Gmail, for instance, in their Gmail app have started, you know, showing messages like, hey, we've noticed you haven't engaged with this message in a long time. Would you like to unsubscribe? So that just tells you, like, they're looking at individual based things instead of just, you know, like sender based data or engagement data. So I think it's going to move more in that direction where, you know, they're really looking at what each and every individual is doing with regard to messages and start filtering those instead of, you know, filtering a majority of messages, which is really good to hear. I think it's going to make it harder for deliverability guys like myself, because, you know, you may be getting, you know, mixed results, like maybe one message that you notice gets filtered. But overall, the campaign is doing really well. So there's always a lot of things that you have to look through whenever you're trying to figure out how your deliverability is going.

00:23:36

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. I definitely, I mean, that's something that you can kind of see like it's almost like organic growth in that sense of. Yeah. You at one point as a mailbox provider were able to just look at IP and have decent results with filtering. And then, you know, when you start sharing IPs like, yeah, you've got to grow to a domain level where you're looking at the domains reputation. And yeah, if, if that stops working out or working as efficiently, like you've got to get an individual basis and things like that. So this is it seems like that's what the landscape is going... it looks like that's where we're headed into the future and there's evidence of that already happening.

00:24:09

Nick Schafer: So yeah, I mean, those are problems that happen in the Gmail app right now. I've seen it myself. So, you know, that just tells you that they're looking at way more than you think. And I'm sure other mailbox providers are doing the same thing now.

00:24:23

Jonathan Torres: And if they haven't, I'm sure Google likes to lead the charge, you know, so we'll look at that. And if they're seeing good results, then people will imitate.

00:24:30

Nick Schafer: You know, rightfully so. Google, like, every time I look at a sender, it just baffles me of how much market share Gmail has. Like it's 50 to 60 percent of most senders’ mailing list. That's why they have to do a lot of volume each and every day. So they have to be on top of their game to protect those users.

00:24:50

Eric Trinidad: Well, with that growing with Google changing it up and offering some of those little additives that others don't do, is there still life in the email? Can we continue to see this? Do you think it's growing? Do you think we can still utilize this platform?

00:25:05

Nick Schafer: No, haven't you heard email’s dying?

00:25:06

Eric Trinidad: Oh.

00:25:06

Nick Schafer: Or email’s dead?

00:25:09

Eric Trinidad: It is, isn't it?

00:25:12

Nick Schafer: I've heard that so many times. Yeah. But the reality is that, you know, email is still thriving. You know, recent reports have showed 44 to 1 ROI on email. That means for every dollar spent on email, you know, you can expect upwards of forty four dollars. So that's crazy. So, you know, money talks is a good phrase to say right here. I mean.

00:25:34

Jonathan Torres: LIke the old school movie?

00:25:35

Nick Schafer: That one. Yeah. Yeah. Like that old school movie. I know y'all are movie buffs.

00:25:41

Jonathan Torres: That was the one from a long time ago. Definitely is. Chris Tucker man. You've got to show respect.

00:25:49

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. I'm sorry. I didn't understand the words that were coming out of your mouth.

00:25:52

Jonathan Torres: OK, ok, that's good. That's a deep cut though.

00:25:54

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Yeah.

00:25:56

Nick Schafer: But I mean really as long as marketers continue to... to get a return on those messages, there's no reason to think like emails going to die in the near future or ever at that. At that point.

00:26:08

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, yeah. I mean with every new avenue of stuff that, you know, starts coming in to get us information into our daily lives, like, I just I personally can't see email going away anytime soon just because of still... it's just a good medium for things to kind of get across. So and I mean, I know people have said email’s dead. I've definitely heard the phrase a few times, but when there's still the benefits in it and people are still using it like you, man. Yeah. It's got a long life left.

00:26:35

Nick Schafer: I mean, I think we're all trained as humans now to check their email like every day.

00:26:40

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. Yeah. Oh yeah. That's definitely I mean I don't want to say wrong numbers, but I know I've definitely seen, like, studies done on what the first thing is people do in the morning emails, one of them. Email's one of those things when you wake up and check.

00:26:52

Nick Schafer: I know I do. But maybe that's just because I'm an email geek and I yeah, I love email.

00:26:56

Jonathan Torres: I think it's all of us here in this room.

00:26:57

Eric Trinidad: I definitely roll out of bed, one eye.

00:27:00

Nick Schafer: First thing!

00:27:02

Eric Trinidad: Oh yeah. That's cool.

00:27:04

Nick Schafer: Yeah. But could you imagine, like, you know, talking about the SMS channel, like if we start getting nothing but spam in there. Like how annoyed we would be. I mean I know it already happens some. Every now and then I get these weird messages. Via text message. I'm like what. Where did this come from. And that's exactly like how spam started in email back in the day. Like we talked about earlier. People didn't know what was going on.

00:27:29

Jonathan Torres: Yeah.

00:27:29

Eric Trinidad: I used to answer all of those, man. This guy needs my help. He's in another country. He knows me obviously.

00:27:38

Nick Schafer: Yeah. Obviously. No, I wanted to say earlier, could you imagine how profitable spam was in the early days. My gosh.

00:27:45

Jonathan Torres: Yeah.

00:27:46

Eric Trinidad: People are probably still living off those residuals. You know, they still have enough money to keep hitting those campaigns hard, you know?

00:27:53

Eric Trinidad: All right, everybody. So we've seen where spam has been, we've seen where we are now with it and what we look like in the future, how to be better senders overall and how to protect ourselves and our campaigns. Nick, thank you so much for coming in and hanging with us today. We really appreciate your time.

00:28:06

Nick Schafer: No, it's been a pleasure, guys. I really have been looking forward to this, and I hope you'll invite me back for a follow up podcast.

00:28:12

Jonathan Torres: Oh, yes, you will. First guest. Thank you for being that.

00:28:15

Nick Schafer: Yeah, I am honored to be the first guest of ya’lls guys’ podcast.

00:28:18

Jonathan Torres: Yeah. And our knight in shining armor for email deliverability. You need to throw that in there.

00:28:23

Eric Trinidad: Yeah, for sure. For sure.

00:28:25

Eric Trinidad: Well Nick, we definitely know where to find you and ya'll know where to find us. Please again continue to look at our, our blog post and any documentation that we're going to be putting in our description in this regard. So thanks, everybody, for your time. We'll see you next time.

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