Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #259 of All About Email!

Last week, I followed up on Issue #256's finding that advanced AI adopters are 54% more likely to follow WCAG and 52% more likely to comply with the European Accessibility Act.

Now that I've read the full report, I wanted to see whether the extra context changes how I'd interpret those figures.

This week, I’m looking at email warm-up and a new blocklist from Validity called Heatwave.

🤔 If someone promises to “warm your domain and improve your deliverability”, what are they actually doing?

Let’s go! 👇

Ever Wondered How That Newsletter Was Made?

You know those emails that land in your inbox and make you think, “Okay… how did they do that?”

With Email Detective, you can sneak a peek ;) 

The free Chrome extension shows you which email marketing platform sent an email, along with technical details like the HTML builder they used and authentication details, right from Gmail or Outlook.

So next time you come across an email you love, investigate it. 

You might pick up a few ideas of your own.

Sponsored

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What Are We Actually Warming?

💡 Gradually increasing your sending volume can be a sensible part of moving platforms or introducing new sending infrastructure.

You send real emails to people who asked to receive them, monitor what happens, and adjust the pace.

Resend’s warmup guidance describes that process and distinguishes it from services that artificially boost engagement.

🤔 The confusion starts when both get sold under the same label. Synthetic warming involves controlled mailboxes exchanging messages and generating opens, clicks and replies to make a sender appear trusted.

Those opens, clicks, and replies are generated to influence reputation. They don’t tell you whether your actual subscribers want your emails.

That distinction matters when someone presents them as evidence that your deliverability is improving.

🤷‍♂️ If I’m paying someone to improve my deliverability, I’d want to understand which of those processes I’m paying for.

Enter Heatwave 🔥

On 3 September 2026, Validity launched Heatwave, a domain blocklist targeting synthetic warming and associated cold-email infrastructure.

At launch, Validity said it had already listed more than one million domains exhibiting artificial-warming patterns.

💡 Andrew Bonar’s explanation on emailexpert highlights something useful: anyone can inspect the public lookup and read how the classifications work.

🤔 Could something you’re paying for to improve deliverability become another signal that your sending practices shouldn’t be trusted?

The Warning Came Before the Blocklist

In his Spam Resource article, Al Iverson describes regularly hearing from senders who need help with deliverability after using warming or outreach services.

🫠 They expected an improvement. Instead, they arrived with inbox-placement problems and a domain reputation that, in his experience, was worse than when they started.

🧠 If a service claims to follow best practices, ask it to explain which practices it follows.

• Matt Vernhout’s EmailKarma piece also places Heatwave in a wider context: the anti-abuse community had already challenged manufactured engagement.

• The M3AAWG position, published in November 2025, explicitly condemns the artificial simulation of subscriber engagement and deceptive methods used to evade filtering.

💡 The anti-abuse community had already warned about these practices. Heatwave adds another way to identify the domains involved.

What Does a Listing Actually Mean?

Before we get carried away, there are a few distinctions worth making.

• Heatwave lists domains, rather than IP addresses.

• Its policy distinguishes an observed synthetic-warming history from subsequent active cold outreach.

Those classifications tell you different things.

🚨 And a listing doesn’t establish that every mailbox provider will reject every email from that domain. Providers decide how to use the signal.

As Matt points out, we shouldn’t assume we know how heavily it will influence inbox placement.

There is, however, an important consequence in Validity’s listing policy:

• A confirmed synthetic-warming observation doesn’t expire simply because the activity stops.

• The active-outreach status can change independently.

• An incorrect classification or attribution can be reviewed and removed.

💡 If your domain is listed, check which classification applies before deciding what to do next.

“But We Don’t Use a Warmup Service”

Maybe you don’t…

🤔 But does your agency? Your sales team? A subcontractor working for your outbound vendor?

Validity warns that warming activity can occur under a brand’s name without the company's knowledge, and that its lookup can surface related domains.

🚨 You might know exactly what happens inside your newsletter platform while having much less visibility into what another team or supplier is doing.

💡 Ask those teams and suppliers which domains they use on your behalf, what they send and whether any synthetic warming is involved.

If the lookup surfaces a domain you don’t recognise, first establish whether it’s connected to your organisation and who operates it.

An unfamiliar domain or listing should be checked before you conclude that your agency has done anything wrong.

What You Can Actually Do

✅ Three practical checks:

1) Get the Domain and Account List

• Ask your teams and suppliers for a list of the sending domains and email accounts they operate on your behalf.

• Who owns them, who has access to them, and what are they used for?

2) Check Your Sending Domains

• Use the Heatwave lookup to check those domains.

• If one is listed, read the classification and investigate the activity behind it. If you believe the listing is incorrect, follow Validity’s review process.

🚨 A clear result doesn’t mean every aspect of your sending is fine.

3) Check Whether Deliverability Is Improving

• If you’re increasing sending volume, ask your email platform or deliverability specialist to help you plan and monitor it.

• Monitor delivery problems, bounces, and spam complaints as you go.

💡 Ask your vendor how it measures improvement, and whether those results come from your actual sends to subscribers.

Before You Go

We’ve spent plenty of time in this newsletter discussing engagement data that becomes unreliable due to privacy features, proxies, and automated systems.

Synthetic warming adds another problem: activity deliberately created to look like interest.

💡 I’m not against using a warming service, but before approving your next warmup service, ask it to explain what it does, who receives the messages and where the engagement comes from.

That’s it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Simon

Quiz Time!

What did you learn this week? Test your knowledge. 👇

The quiz will open in a new window when you choose the first answer.

Have fun! 🤩

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• September - Creative of the Month. (Action Rocket)

• Don’t be Fooled - Email warm-up tools promise a shortcut. (Mailgun)

• growth.engineer - An open-source catalogue of go-to-market tools and workflows that any AI agent can run. (Brew)

• Sync Disruptions - Mac Users Face Microsoft 365 Sync Issues as EWS Phased Out. (Spam Resource)

• APRF - A New Look at Email Performance. (Email Karma)

• Specialist Dot - OpenAI announces an email marketing agent, but only as an enterprise pilot. (Emailexpert)

• Email Production - What advanced AI adopters do differently. (Knak)

• iOS 27 & email - What marketers need to know. (Action Rocket)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #258 of All About Email!

Last week, we discussed the new Apple Mail app, which shipped with iOS 27. The change I focused on is how Mail helps people find an email after it’s disappeared down their inbox.

This week, we are following up on Issue #256, in which I examined the finding that advanced AI adopters are 54% more likely to follow WCAG and 52% more likely to comply with the European Accessibility Act.

I hadn’t read the full report then, and I said I’d revisit my questions once I had.

I’m doing exactly that this week. There’s useful extra context, but does it change how I’d interpret those figures?

Let’s go! 👇

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and many more to be announced soon…

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What Can We Answer Now?

💡 Now that I’ve read the report, I’ve got the methodology:

• Litmus and Validity surveyed 502 marketing professionals across the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

• The 30-question survey ran from 19 November to 17 December 2025.

🙋‍♂️ Having not seen the full report, I had three questions in Issue #256.

Let’s look at those now, remembering that data is important, but so is data context; we shouldn’t just accept figures presented to us.

1) How Many People Were In Each Group?

The report says 28% selected advanced AI adoption, indicating that AI was deeply integrated into their email marketing workflows and decision-making processes.

That gives us an approximate idea of the group’s size. However, we still don’t have the exact respondent counts behind the accessibility comparison.

2) Exactly What Were They Asked?

We can see the AI adoption question and its answer options. There’s also a question about how companies approach accessibility requirements.

🚨 The accessibility chart on page 19 appears to have a labelling error: it repeats the hiring-skill categories from page 11, with different percentages.

The surrounding text explicitly reports that 26% of organisations follow WCAG and 21% follow regional mandates such as the EAA. But the chart labels don’t match those findings, so we can’t reliably reconstruct the accessibility answer options from this page.

3) Were Their Answers Checked Against Actual Emails?

The methodology doesn’t describe an independent assessment of the emails sent by these teams.

💡 So the distinction from Issue #256 still matters: reporting that you follow accessibility standards isn’t the same as demonstrating that your finished emails meet them.

That doesn’t mean respondents are wrong. It means we need to be careful about what their answers establish.

The Overall Figures Add Context

The report states that 26% of organisations follow WCAG standards, while 21% follow regional mandates such as the EAA.

Those are useful figures to have alongside the headline comparison. But there’s a detail missing.

💡 When the report says advanced adopters are “54% more likely” to follow WCAG, that passage doesn’t explicitly identify who they’re being compared with:

• All respondents?

• Early adopters?

• Everyone outside the advanced group?

We shouldn’t assume the overall rate is the starting point and calculate an advanced-adopter rate from it.

🚨 And these remain figures about reported practices. They don’t tell us how many finished emails passed an accessibility assessment, or which problems subscribers encountered.

What Counts As “Advanced”?

This was one of the most useful qualifications in the report.

When discussing regional differences in AI adoption, the authors acknowledge that these might reflect genuine sophistication, earlier investment, or differences in how teams interpret “advanced”.

💡 That matters when we’re using the label to explain better results.

Think about two teams:

• One uses AI extensively for copy and audience segmentation.

• The other uses it to help write code and check emails before sending.

Both might describe their adoption as advanced, but their workflows could be quite different.

Those are my examples, rather than a breakdown the report provides.

🤔 They illustrate why I’d still want to know which tasks improved, how the results were checked and what changed for subscribers.

Knowing that a team uses lots of AI doesn’t answer those questions.

It’s A Similar Story With ROI

The report also says advanced AI adopters are 75% more likely to achieve email ROI above 45:1.

It discusses better targeting, personalised content and faster learning, then connects the group’s production-speed advantage with stronger financial returns.

🤔 Those explanations might be right. But the analysis presented doesn’t separate AI’s contribution from other differences between the teams:

• Experienced staff,

• Better customer data,

• Established testing processes,

• And extensive use of AI could all coexist within the same organisation.

🚨 We can’t tell from these findings how much each contributed. That also applies to my alternative explanation in Issue #256. I suggested that stronger processes might help explain the accessibility gap.

The full report leaves that possibility open. But it doesn’t prove it.

Does This Change My Interpretation?

A little, in terms of context. It doesn’t fundamentally change my advice.

We know more about the survey, how respondents classified their AI adoption and the overall accessibility figures.

🚨 We still don’t have evidence showing that introducing AI caused the reported accessibility difference.

For your own programme, I’d start with one specific task you want AI to improve:

• Drafting alt text? Record how often it needs correcting and whether it describes the image’s purpose appropriately.

• Checking email code? Record which problems it catches and which it misses during your usual review.

• Saving production time? Include the time spent checking and fixing its output.

💡 You can then make a more useful decision as to whether that particular AI step earns its place in your workflow.

✅ Keep the consistent checks and comparisons we discussed in Issue #256, and look for new problems and improvements.

Before You Go

Big thanks to Anand Subramanian for sharing the link to Litmus’s full report, as I couldn’t get it myself after submitting the form twice and tagging Litmus on socials. 🫠

I said I’d revisit the findings once I had the full report, including whether it changed my interpretation. It has added useful detail. It has also helped me be more specific about what’s still missing:

• The accessibility comparison groups,

• A corrected chart,

• And more information about how reported practices were assessed.

🤷‍♂️ Whether AI will improve your emails’ accessibility will depend on both the quality of the AI and how you use it.

But you don’t have to wait for another report to investigate what’s happening in your own programme.

🤔 So, I’ll leave you with this:

• Have you kept an AI step because you could demonstrate an improvement?

• Or removed one because checking and correcting its output created more work?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}. I’d love to hear what you found.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Simon

Quiz Time - 4 Quick Questions!

🎉 Last week’s quiz was a big hit!

So, I’m continuing to test out a new feature called “Quiz Time” so you can see what you learned in this week’s email.

The quiz will open in a new window when you choose the first answer.

Have fun! 🤩

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• AI Agents and AI-Managed Inboxes - How They Work and What They Mean for Email. (ZeroBounce)

• Ask AI - What is Backscatter? (2026 Version) (Spam Resource)

• Omnichannel Loyalty CRM - How to create connected customer journeys. (ActionRocket)

• beehiiv for Enterprise 2026 - How Businesses Build Owned Audiences. (beehiiv)

• 44 Billion Messages of Data - Breaking Through Peak Season Noise. (Mailchimp)

• A “LOT” of Information - Sometimes the most valuable thing you can do is absolutely nothing. (Lauren Meyer)

• Unsub - Bulk Unsubscribe from senders in Gmail's Manage subscriptions. (Chris Byrne)

• The Evolution of Email - The Email Playbook Is Not One-Size-Fits-All Anymore. (Email Talk)

• Deliverability Academy - Peak Season, Fewer Answers. (Mailgun)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #257 of All About Email!

Last week, I dug into a stat from Litmus and Validity about AI adoption and accessibility. It sounds encouraging. But I think we need to be careful about what we take from it.

This week, Apple has shipped iOS 27. The change I want to focus on is how Mail helps people find an email after it’s disappeared down their inbox.

🤔 We spend a lot of time wondering whether subscribers will open our emails. How much time do we spend thinking about whether they can find them again?

Let’s go! 👇

Ever Wondered How That Newsletter Was Made?

You know those emails that land in your inbox and make you think, “Okay… how did they do that?”

With Email Detective, you can sneak a peek ;) 

The free Chrome extension shows you which email marketing platform sent an email, along with technical details like the HTML builder they used and authentication details, right from Gmail or Outlook.

So next time you come across an email you love, investigate it. 

You might pick up a few ideas of your own.

Sponsored

Install Email Detective for Free Today

What Actually Changed in Apple Mail?

iOS 27 was released on Monday, 14 September, with eight new features.

🚨 Apple describes a new Mail search ranking system designed to bring the most relevant results to the top, including messages buried deeper in your inbox.

• That doesn’t tell us exactly how the ranking works, or mean keywords and recency have stopped mattering.

• MacRumors gives an example: someone searching for a retailer to find an order may see the order confirmation above promotional emails from the same business.

• That makes sense for someone looking for their order. It isn’t evidence that marketing emails are being pushed down across every search.

There are other changes, too.

Depending on your device and feature availability, Siri can help with messages, contextual suggestions offer quick actions, and Call Context can surface useful information from an email when you ring a business.

💡 But search is the bit I’d pay attention to as a sender.

Why Does Search Matter?

People already revisit emails. Booking confirmations, useful newsletters, discount codes they vaguely remember receiving.

Better search could make that easier, and I’ve already discovered something very interesting with Gmail’s AI search.

Which raises a few practical questions. 👇

1) Does Your Email Still Make Sense Later?

🤷‍♂️ Maybe not all emails have to make sense later, but let’s consider this example:

• Someone searching for a workshop in November might find your September email.

• Will they immediately understand when it took place? Is the booking link still useful? Does the landing page explain that it has finished?

2) Are Your Important Details in Live Text?

Dates, prices, booking references and venue names shouldn’t exist only inside an image.

• Movable Ink says Call Context reads live text first and can use optical character recognition to extract text from images. That’s a claim about Call Context, though, not proof of how Mail search indexes image content.

• I wouldn’t assume images are invisible. I also wouldn’t rely on image recognition to make essential information usable.

🚨 This connects with Issue #244, where we looked at writing for AI summaries, and our earlier accessibility discussion in Issue #241.

✅ Making information easier to read remains useful, whatever happens to search.

What Don’t We Know Yet?

🤔 What I’d like to know is whether subscribers will use the improved search to revisit our emails.

• Will they find an offer they’d forgotten about or a newsletter they meant to read?

• And will that lead to a click, a booking or a purchase?

That’s the bit we can’t judge from Apple’s examples.

I also wouldn’t give templates a blanket “all-clear”.

💡 Apple says the new search brings more relevant results to the top, but I haven’t found a detailed explanation of how it ranks them.

For now, that leaves us without much basis for claiming that a particular subject line or content change will improve your position in search.

Your Subscribers Won’t All See the Same Thing

MacRumors reports that the search improvements are available on iPhones running iOS 27, while the AI features require compatible hardware (sadly, my iPad can’t run them🥺).

It also reports that Siri AI isn’t available in the EU or China at launch. Apple lists contextual suggestions as English-only.

🤔 If you send to a mixed UK and EU list, device, language, location and settings can all affect the experience.

So these changes are coming to everyone’s Apple Mail app.

What You Can Actually Do

✅ Five practical checks you can do now:

1) Search for Your Own Emails

In an Apple Mail test inbox running iOS 27, try finding your last three campaigns using what a subscriber might remember.

Your results won’t predict everyone else’s, but they can highlight unclear wording.

2) Be Descriptive

Give subject lines, preview text, and body copy enough context to explain the topic.

You can still be interesting without making readers guess.

3) Use Live Text for Essential Details

Dates, prices, codes, reference numbers and locations should be readable without relying on an image.

4) Check Campaigns and Automated Emails for Staleness

Use explicit deadlines, including the year where helpful.

Make sure linked pages explain current availability or what to do when an offer has ended.

5) Test Your Templates

Send yourself a test of each main email template you use, then open them in the latest version of Apple Mail.

• Can you read the important details with images turned off?

• Does dark mode leave everything legible?

• Are buttons easy to tap, and do links take you where you expect them to?

💡 Test the emails your subscribers actually receive, not just the preview in your email platform.

Before You Go

Apple has changed Mail’s search ranking. What that means for your campaigns is still something you need to observe.

💡 However, you don’t need to wait for that evidence to make dates clearer, keep important details in live text or fix an unhelpful landing page.

🤔 Try finding one of your own campaigns in a test inbox using only what you remember about its content.

• Could you find it?

• And did it still make sense when you opened it?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}. I’d love to know what you find.

Quiz Time!

This week, I’m testing out a new feature called “Quiz Time” so you can see what you learned in this week’s email.

The quiz will open in a new window when you choose the first answer. Have fun! 🤩

That’s it for this week. 👋

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• What’s Your Inbox Persona? - New Yahoo Mail Research Reveals Four Inbox Management Styles. (Yahoo)

• Growth - How to Convert Readers to Your Newsletter Through Events. (Inbox Collective)

• Five Year Ticket Fixed - Gmail app dark mode update. (Email Markup Consortium)

• Clean the risk - Email List Cleaning That Protects Your Inbox Revenue. (Bento)

• In Concept - The story behind Envelope Accessibility™. (Paul Airy)

• A Turning Tide? - Gambling with cold email. (Laura Atkins)

• 👀 I Cannot Wait!! - timewaster. (Jack Ellis)

• Version 2.0 - M3AAWG Best Practices for Sending Legally Mandated

  Emails to Large Audiences. (M3AAWG)

• Dangling DNS CNAMEs - How DMARC Helps Detect Organised SPF Abuse Schemes. (dmarcian)

• The new trust problem - Generative AI in cybersecurity. (Valimail)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #256 of All About Email!

Last week, my final guest author of the summer, Annett Forcier, explored email brand guides and what happens when dark mode gets involved.

This week, I want to dig into a stat from Litmus and Validity about AI adoption and accessibility. It sounds encouraging. But I think we need to be careful about what we take from it.

Let’s go! 👇

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What Does the Stat Actually Say?

🚨 According to the State of Email 2026 report landing page, advanced AI adopters are:

• 54% more likely to follow the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).

• 52% more likely to comply with the European Accessibility Act (EAA).

The research surveyed around 500 marketing professionals across the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand.

💡 Notice the wording: more likely to follow accessibility guidelines. That doesn’t mean their emails are “54% more accessible”. And it doesn’t tell us that introducing AI improved anybody’s accessibility by 54%.

🤔 Before turning this into advice, I’d want to know:

• How many people were in each group,

• Exactly what they were asked,

• And whether their answers were checked against the emails they actually sent.

💡 This issue looks at Litmus and Validity’s publicly available findings. I haven’t reviewed the full report or survey questionnaire, so I’m focusing on what the headline figures tell us rather than assessing the research methodology itself.

Is AI Doing the Work?

Validity’s press release describes advanced adopters as teams that have incorporated AI into their workflows and decision-making.

It says AI helps them produce accessible campaigns more efficiently and tackle compliance gaps systematically.

💡 That’s a possible explanation. But I’d like to see:

• Which tasks improved,

• How they checked the results,

• And what changed for subscribers.

The public description also leaves room for another possibility: these teams may already have better processes.

Think about a team with someone responsible for accessibility, reusable templates, a proper review process and time allocated to fixing problems:

• Those things could help it introduce AI successfully.

• They could also help it produce better emails before AI enters the picture.

🤔 Are we seeing the effect of AI, the effect of how the team works, or a mixture of both?

💡 In Issue #201, guest author Sarah Gallardo suggested starting with questions about the existing process: who writes the alt text, who checks contrast, and how the people making and approving emails communicate.

I picked those questions out in my own comments because they’re such a useful starting point. They’re also the kinds of differences I’d want to understand between these teams before attributing the gap to AI.

What Else Would I Want to Check?

1) What Changed Alongside The AI Rollout?

If a team introduced new templates, clearer content rules and an accessibility review at the same time, it would be difficult to give AI all the credit for any improvement.

🚨 That’s also why I’m cautious about the idea that cleaning up HTML for AI automatically delivers accessibility.

Clear structure is useful, but accessibility involves more than tidy markup. The WCAG requirements also address things such as text alternatives, contrast and keyboard access where applicable.

2) Are The Teams Facing Comparable Legal Obligations?

The EAA’s main application date was 28 June 2025. It covers specified products and consumer services, including e-commerce, with exemptions and transitional provisions.

It isn’t a blanket rule that every marketing email to anyone in the EU has identical obligations. The EU’s business guidance explains the scope.

💡 If the groups differ in the services they provide or the markets they serve, that could affect their investment in accessibility.

(But we’d need those breakdowns to investigate it.)

3) How Is Accessibility Being Assessed?

💡 Teams may interpret “following WCAG” differently.

Some might mean they have a policy; others might mean they regularly test their output.

That’s a question of survey wording and verification, not a reason to assume respondents are wrong.

What Can You Actually Do With This?

💡 In Issue #241, I covered the Email Markup Consortium’s finding that just 8 of 376,348 emails analysed passed all its automated accessibility checks.

That’s a separate study, but it brings me back to a practical question: whatever tools we use, how are we checking the emails subscribers actually receive?

I’ve had to ask this about my own newsletter. In Issue #177, I shared what Parcel flagged before I made changes: some issues were template-related, while others needed a conversation with Beehiiv.

💡 That gave me something concrete to work with: which problems I could fix myself, and which needed help from the platform.

Here’s how I’d approach it in your programme:

• Give accessibility an owner and time in the process. Someone needs to own fixing problems, including raising issues with your platform.

• Review your templates and finished emails. Check heading structure, meaningful link text, appropriate image alternatives, reading order and colour contrast. Test in the email clients your audience uses.

• Combine automated checks with human review. As W3C explains, tools alone cannot establish accessibility. Include keyboard and screen-reader checks where relevant, and involve people with disabilities in testing when possible.

• Check what AI actually changes. Use consistent checks, look for new problems as well as fixes, and record other workflow changes. Where practical, compare similar emails produced with and without the AI step to help separate its contribution.

🚨 If AI reliably helps you remove barriers, that’s awesome! Keep checking the finished emails and build what works into your regular process.

Before You Go

Validity sells AI-powered marketing tools, so it has a commercial interest in how you interpret these findings. That’s why we should examine the evidence carefully. It doesn’t, by itself, tell us whether the explanation is right or wrong.

The same scrutiny needs to apply to my alternative explanations.

🤔 This is a useful finding, but I want to understand what’s behind it. Once I’ve read the full report, I’ll revisit these questions, including whether it changes my interpretation.

For now, I wouldn’t use this headline alone to decide whether AI will improve your emails’ accessibility.

So, I’ll leave you with this: if you’ve introduced AI into your email workflow, have you checked whether the finished emails are easier to read and use? What actually improved?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}. I’d love to hear what you’re finding.

That’s it for this week. 👋

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• New from Validity - The Heatwave Domain Blocklist. (Spam Resource)

• Take A Step Back - What are you actually trying to accomplish? (Lauren Meyer)

• Button Stockholm-Syndrome - Are best practices ruining our click rates? (Travis Hazlewood)

• MX 0 - A free threat intel source for brand abuse. (Alex Shakhov)

• Verified Sender Program is live - We're now seeing status updates in Google Postmaster Tools. (Brian Sisolak)

• The User Ladder - Why Knowing More About Your Readers is Your Newsletter’s Next Unfair Advantage. (Inbox Collective)

• 11 Myths - One extremely competitive voyage to the spam folder. (Alison Gootee)

• 7 best DMARC tools - For MSPs and multi-client management. (Valimail)

• Yes, I said higher! - Your open rates might be higher than you think. (Robert Brandl)

• Bad Ideas - Why Giving Your Email List to a Third Party Is Just Dumb. (Spam Resource)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #255 of All About Email!

Last week we looked at Part Two of my CNIL deep dive, where I asked: “Should we just turn open tracking off?”

This week is my seventh and final guest in our summer series, Annett Forcier, as she explores email brand guides and dark mode. As usual, there’s a sprinkling of my thoughts at the end.

Let’s go! 👇

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☀️ You might argue I am bending the rules this week with my final “Summer Series” guest, as meteorological Autumn has begun, but British Summer Time (BST) doesn’t finish until October 25th - go figure 🤷‍♂️ 🤣.

Before we get into Annett’s piece this week, perhaps you are new here or missed the rest of my guests; well, here’s a recap:

• Issue 245 - Deliverability Consulting Is Just Email Therapy (Alison Gootee).

• Issue 245 - In The Room (Des Brown).

• Issue 248 - There was just one problem with this email (Vicky Smith).

• Issue 249 - Think "Inside" the Inbox (Nikki Elbaz).

• Issue 251 - What can the emails from 16,655 brands tell you? (Robert Brandl).

• Issue 253 - Your "above the fold" button might not be above the fold (Travis Hazlewood).

Now on to my guest of the summer, take it away, Annett! 🎉

Your Brand Book Stops at the Inbox

Most brands I meet have a beautiful brand book. Primary and secondary colours, logo do's and don'ts, typography, spacing, tone of voice.

🚨 It's polished, it's precise… and it almost always stops before the inbox.

Because here's the thing nobody warns you about: email is the one place your brand colours don't stay put.

A single hex code that looks perfect on your website gets reinterpreted the moment dark mode enters the picture, and every email client handles that differently.

🫠 Outlook, Gmail, and Apple Mail each apply their own inversions and colour shifts, so the same navy can land three different ways.

That crisp navy goes muddy. Your black logo vanishes into a dark background.

💡 The "on-brand" button suddenly fails contrast. None of that is a designer being careless. It's the absence of a system.

Brand colours aren't a hex code; they're a set of decisions

Most clients arrive with a proper palette: primaries, secondaries, a set of neutrals.

💡 What's missing isn't colours; it's decisions “about” those colours.

Each one still shows up as a single flat hex value, and email doesn't ask "what are your brand colours?" It asks a dozen sharper questions of each one:

• What does this colour become when a client force-inverts it in dark mode?

• Does your logo have a version that survives on a dark background?

• What's the fallback when a gradient or background image gets stripped?

• Is there enough contrast for the text sitting on top, in both modes?

✅ A hex code can't answer any of those. A style guide can.

The moment you treat each brand colour as a small set of decisions - light value, dark value, the pairing it's allowed to sit on, the contrast it has to clear - you've stopped guessing and started designing.

You make the call once, write it down, and every future email inherits it.

Test at the system level, not the send level

💡 The gap I keep running into is structural: colour gets judged, if it gets judged at all, inside a single email, never as a reusable ingredient.

A hex looks right in one campaign and ships. The same hex turns up in the “next” email, in a different context, and breaks. 🫠

And context is the whole game, because the same brand hex behaves completely differently depending on what it's applied to and where it renders.

• Say you set it as your body text: on Apple Mail on iOS, you can actually target that text colour and hold it in dark mode.

• Put the same hex on a logo image sitting on a coloured background, or open it in Gmail, which ignores those dark-mode overrides and recolours on its own, and your control is gone.

🚨 The problem was never that one email. It was that the colour was never validated as a reusable token: across the elements it sits on and the clients that each treat it differently.

Testing at the design-system level flips that. Instead of asking "does this email look right?" you ask "does this colour behave everywhere it's allowed to go, light mode, dark mode, on every background we pair it with?"

Do that once, and you stop re-litigating the same rendering surprise every campaign.

🧠 Your email style guide becomes the place those answers live, so the next person doesn't have to rediscover them the hard way.

Dark mode is the honesty test

I've said before that dark mode gets treated like an afterthought, and brand colours are exactly where it shows.

Take a yellow button with black text, a strong, high-contrast call to action, right on brand:

• On Apple Mail on iOS, you can target both the button colour and the font colour, and hold them steady across light and dark mode. In Gmail you can't, not reliably, and not even with the gradient trick.

• Gmail flips that black font to white, so your clean black-on-yellow becomes white-on-yellow. That doesn't just look off-brand; it fails a basic contrast check and is genuinely hard for “anyone” to read.

Same button, same code, it simply doesn't survive the trip. Nobody made a bad decision here; the decision was simply never made.

🚨 That's the honesty test. Dark mode doesn't invent new problems; it exposes the ones your colours were always going to have.

If your palette carries a documented dark-mode value, a logo that reads on dark, and contrast that survives being inverted, dark mode is a non-event. If it doesn't, it's the day your brand quietly comes apart in inboxes you'll never think to check.

That's really the whole case for an email style guide.

💡 It's not bureaucracy or a nice-to-have PDF. It's the difference between making a decision once, on purpose, and remaking it badly under deadline pressure every single send.

If you want to go deeper on the dark-mode side of this, I got into it on Really Good Emails' Feedback Friday: "Stop treating Dark Mode like an afterthought."

And if building this kind of style guide for your own emails sounds useful, that's exactly the work I do at EmailBoutique; happy to talk it through.

Thanks for having me, Simon. 🙌

Annett

Annett Forcier is the Founder & Managing Director of EmailBoutique Digital, an AI-enabled email design studio specialising in custom email design systems, modular templates, and scalable production workflows. Partnering with Denada, she combines human expertise with AI to help marketing teams create high-quality, on-brand emails faster without compromising accessibility, code quality, or design standards. Her clients include Shopify, UPS, The Ohio State University, Lululemon, Rogers, and Change[dot]org. Follow Annett on Social: LinkedIn Instagram

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

A lot of Annett’s guest post lines up with how I think about email design.

💡 A website brand guide is not necessarily an email brand guide. But I think there is also a broader point here about what brand consistency actually means in email.

Perfect consistency across every inbox is not always possible. Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail each have too much influence over the finished result, especially once dark mode enters the picture.

🚨 That does not mean accepting a broken or inaccessible email. It means recognising that consistency and uniformity are not necessarily the same thing.

An email can adapt across different environments and still feel unmistakably like the same brand. The colours may shift, a logo may need an alternative treatment, or a fallback may be less visually ambitious, but the identity should remain intact.

🤔 Perhaps that is what an email style guide really needs to define: not just how the brand should look when everything works perfectly, but how it should adapt when the inbox has other ideas.

I’ve talked about Dark Mode in this newsletter a lot over the years, so this week’s “News & Tips” section below contains lots of useful links about Dark Mode. 🎉

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}},

Simon

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🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips are all about Dark Mode:

• Free Tool - Email Dark-Mode Preview. (EmailBoutique)

• Brand Colour Palette - How to design for Dark Mode. (Paul Airy)

• Control Your Colours - How forced dark mode works in email. (Mark Robbins)

• Guide to Dark Mode - What is email dark mode? (Parcel)

• Ultimate Guide to Dark Mode - [+ Code Snippets, Tools, Tips from the Email Community]. (Litmus)

• Dark Mode Survival Kit - Say goodbye to dark mode email surprises. (Mailmodo)

• Tutorial - Optimize your Logo for Dark Mode in 2-minutes or less. (Email Love)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #254 of All About Email!

Last week, my guest author Travis Hazlewood stole the headlines as my most popular newsletter of the last ten weeks! So, if you missed it, check it out.

This week, I'm back with Part Two of my deep dive into the CNIL, asking: “Should we just turn open tracking off?”

Let’s go! 👇

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^{_{Open to U.S. residents only.}}

⚠️ Before we get stuck in, I am not a legal professional or a privacy expert (although I am a big privacy advocate, and cover topics like this often), so the below is not legal advice; check with your organisation’s legal support.

🚨 If you missed Part One in Issue #252, you might want to check that out, as I looked at why simply identifying your “French and Italian contacts” and disabling open tracking for them isn't the neat compliance solution it first appears to be.

That leaves us with a tough question:

If recipient-level tracking consent is still difficult or impossible on many ESPs, should we just turn open tracking off altogether?

It sounds drastic. But given how unreliable open data has already become, maybe it's a conversation we should be having anyway.

The Case for Just Turning It All Off

🤔 Given all of this, what about the option that most compliance guides mention briefly and then skip past: turning off open tracking globally, for everyone, full stop.

If no recipient-specific tracking pixel, or any equivalent open-tracking resource, is included, there is no open-tracking consent to obtain in France or Italy and no separate open-tracking consent signal to maintain for each contact.

🧠 That does not remove the need to document permission to send the email, or address any other tracking you still use.

🚨 One important caveat: a setting labelled “open tracking off” does not necessarily mean the tracking pixel is removed.

💡 Before treating a global switch as the complete answer, check exactly what your ESP disables: the pixel itself, individual recording, or merely the reporting attached to it.

A Note on the Data You Are Losing

🚨 A recorded open doesn't necessarily mean someone read your email. It means the tracking image was requested. That request may have resulted from:

• A recipient displaying the email with images enabled, without necessarily reading it.

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection downloading its remote content in the background, whether the recipient engages with the email or not.

• Gmail retrieving and caching the image through its proxy, obscuring some of the information that would otherwise accompany the request.

• A security, privacy or other automated system fetching the image.

And the reverse is also true: someone can read an email without triggering an open at all if remote images are blocked.

💡 Open rate has not reliably measured "people who read the email" for years. I covered this in Issue #238. Removing it and rebuilding your measurement around better signals isn't just a compliance workaround; it's better practice:

• Clicks, replies, registrations, purchases, downloads, preference updates, subscriber retention.

• The things that actually tell you whether your email programme is working.

The Disadvantages Are Real Too

I'd be doing you a disservice if I didn't tell you about what switching it off could actually cost you (and this isn’t an exclusive list):

• Subject line testing becomes harder without open rate as the primary signal.

• Send-time optimisation loses an input.

• Re-engagement programmes built around “hasn't opened in 90 days” need to be rethought:

  • If you use selective tracking, this creates the ghost reader problem I mentioned in Issue #239: someone can keep reading every email, but because they've opted out of open tracking, your ESP may classify them as inactive.

  • If you switch open tracking off globally, the problem changes. You no longer have a hidden subset of ghost readers; you can't use opens as an inactivity signal for anyone, so you have to rebuild your sunset and re-engagement logic around other behaviour.

• Publishers reporting open-derived estimated impressions to sponsors lose that number.

• Historical campaign comparisons break.

🚨 Those are real trade-offs. But they don't make unreliable or potentially unlawful tracking acceptable.

They show how much of the email marketing ecosystem has been built around a metric that stopped being dependable a while ago. The regulation may simply be forcing email marketing to admit it.

Don't Just Blindly Replace Opens with Clicks

This feels like the obvious answer. And as you know from Issue #237, my epic mess-up with click-based triggers, it comes with its own problems. Two of them, actually:

An Operational Problem

💡 As I discovered the hard way, some of your most engaged readers may never click a thing:

• The privacy-conscious ones who already block open tracking are often the same people stripping tracked links before they click.

• I do it myself: copy the URL, strip the parameters, paste it into a browser. The click never registers, but the content gets consumed.

A Legal Problem

🚨 Tracked clicks are not automatically outside privacy scrutiny either.

• The EDPB's own Guidelines 2/2023, which CNIL explicitly cites, cover tracking links as well as pixels.

• Personalised redirect URLs, the kind most ESPs use to track clicks, can identify individual recipients and raise ePrivacy questions.

• Connecting a click to subsequent website activity can involve cookies, CRM matching, and further profiling.

Turning off open tracking doesn't give you a free pass to make click tracking more invasive. The goal is better measurement, not just different invisible tracking.

🧠 Clicks are a better signal than opens. But swap one for the other and call it done? That's not a strategy. We need to start building a broader, more defensible signal mix of engagement that’s relevant to our audiences and brands.

Where This Leaves Marketers

I’ve talked about this before in Issue 239, but here’s a little refresher of what I’ve come up with, and bearing in mind this isn't legal advice, and your DPO should be involved before anything structural changes.

💡 Some of the things I'm suggesting you might not be able to do with your ESP right now, and for me, that's the case:

Ask Your ESP

• Can your ESP prevent consent-requiring open tracking for a recipient who hasn't consented?

• You could then ask separately how that is technically achieved.

Audit What Depends on Opens

• Map every flow that uses individual open data.

• Automations, engagement segments, lead scores, sunset policies, resend-to-non-openers.

• Separate deliverability management (suppression, sunset logic) from marketing optimisation (segmentation, personalisation, send-time testing).

🚨 These now have different rules and different consent requirements/exemption analyses.

Stop Using Open Data for Profiling and Sales Activity

Where you don't have valid consent, stop. Those uses are hard to fit within either regulator's narrow exemptions, and they're the highest-risk use cases if enforcement comes.

Add a Tracking Consent Withdrawal Link to Your Footer

💡 This is separate from a normal unsubscribe. No re-entry of the email address, effective immediately, and it needs to work for emails already in the inbox, not just future sends.

🤔 Beehiiv still can’t do this. Brevo and Customer[dot]io provide recipient-facing withdrawal mechanisms, while Klaviyo says a consent-status change stops it recording opens even from emails already in the inbox.

But I still haven’t found public documentation confirming that any of them natively provide all three elements together: a one-click withdrawal link, immediate effect, and explicit neutralisation of tracking from previously delivered emails.

Check Your Open Data Storage

• Under the CNIL's individual deliverability exemption, you should retain only the “date”, not the timestamp of the last known open, overwritten with each new interaction.

• If your ESP is storing a full engagement history, you cannot rely on that narrow exemption to justify a full individual open history.

💡 For now, I'd guess that's outside of most ESP users' control.

If Your ESP Can't Do Recipient-Level Controls, Consider Disabling Globally

• A conservative global switch removes the guessing game entirely.

• A France-and-Italy-only segment based on email domains may reduce risk, but it shouldn't be presented as a complete compliance solution. (It isn't.)

And Talk to Your Legal Team

🚨 Before making any compliance decisions, a "recommendation" from a regulator has a way of becoming something else entirely when enforcement starts, which it has for the CNIL.

Before You Go

🤔 Maybe the real mistake is treating open tracking as something we have to save?

We’ve spent years building subject-line tests, sunset policies, engagement scores and sponsor reporting around a signal that no longer reliably tells us whether someone actually read the email.

💡 The CNIL and Garante may be forcing a conversation about compliance, but perhaps the more useful question is whether this is the push we needed to build better measurement in the first place.

For more information on this topic, check out Issues 252, 238, and 239.

That's it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🎉 My Favourite Email of Last Year - How We Built a Personalised Wrapped Email. (Multiplied Media x Action Rocket)

• Verified, not invited - What Gmail’s political sender program actually says about deliverability. (Mailgun & Alison Gootee)

• 😬 This Makes Me Nervous - Claude Can Now Press Send, Reply and FWD in Gmail Too. (Emailexpert)

• Deliverability Analysis - Gmail Will Now Tell You, in Plain Language, Whether Users Want Your Email. (Emailexpert)

• U-Turn - Apple Not Changing "Hide My Email" Addresses After All. (Spam Resource)

• An Opportunity - Use Surveys or Petitions to Grow. (Inbox Collective)

• 🐴 The Deliverab-Iliad, Chapter Nine - Troy, the Transactional Trojan Horse. (Alison Gootee)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #253 of All About Email!

Last week, I returned to the CNIL and Garante tracking pixel story from Issues #238 and #239. The response to those two issues was bigger than I expected, and a lot of what's been written publicly since has left me with a nagging feeling that something important is being missed.

This week is my sixth guest author of the summer, Travis Hazlewood! Travis first appeared as a guest last summer with some serious Monkey Island feels and one of my most popular issues of this year!

He’s back with another treasure trove of an issue.

Let’s go, Travis! 👇

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What’s it take to improve click rates?

🚨 Like most marketers, you likely focus on important things like content and promotion choices…but you may be missing something you wouldn’t expect:

• Your audience’s engagement psychology.

Over the last few months, I manually pulled apart real campaigns, account by account, send by send, hunting for what actually affects clicks.

💡 And what I found was surprising…not just because trends exist, but because the biggest trend is that the exceptions are also their own trends.

So, before you waste another minute changing the colour of your button, let’s see if you even need a button there in the first place.

Key findings from my research around click-rate trends

Note: “Primary CTA” references the major CTA focal point of the content, usually the first button, while “Secondary CTA” references any other CTAs that follow

1) Above the fold is one of the few principles that holds

The pattern was remarkably consistent:

• 📊 For most senders, 70-95% of clicks occur on the Primary CTA, even when multiple Secondary CTAs are present.

• It is so consistently present, even for lacklustre campaigns, that one could say the Primary CTA drives more of the campaign's click performance than all Secondary CTAs combined.

There are exceptions where I saw the gap shrunken between Primary and Secondary but never below Primary representing 30% of clicks. 

2) Above-the-fold is not necessarily above the fold

🚨 Interestingly enough, as I investigated those cases where Primary CTA clicks were 70-95% of total campaign clicks, I found many Primary CTAs were not actually visible upon email open. (aka, not “technically” above the fold).

What was more common than not:

• Large hero images as the only thing initially visible at open

• A similarly sized text block that followed it

• A relevant CTA button after all of that
  (AKA, it took almost two full scrolls to get to the button)

And those campaigns performed just as well, seeing the same/similar click rates and distributions across Primary vs Secondary…

💡 Meaning, if you can get someone to open your email, they will likely give you up to that first button before deciding whether to continue or abandon the email.

3) CTA formats perform differently for Primary vs Secondary CTAs

Most people think either buttons or images work better in general, but that doesn’t appear to be the case.

In many cases, link format preferences appear almost completely opposite for Primary vs Secondary CTAs.

• For Primary CTAs, buttons performed better on average than images

• Conversely, for Secondary CTAs, images perform better on average 

And in the exception cases, Primary and Secondary CTAs trend consistently with a format preference relative to their own grouping.

🚨 The most important piece here isn't whether you should or shouldn’t use buttons, but that your audience is engaging with you in a trend you can predict and should adjust to.

4) “Too many links” is just a presentation problem

💡 There is a deliverability caveat: More external domains in your content “can” mean more reputation risk. 

That said, senders with strong sending practices can routinely include 20+ links with zero issue. Reputation beats a link-count caveat every time.

As for the myth that too many links kill click rate, the only reason I’ve found is messy content formatting:

• Multiple links above the fold performed just fine as long as the first piece of content stayed singular and skimmable. 

• Below the fold, it gets even easier, sometimes to the point where the sky’s the limit (though don’t expect everyone to scroll through 100 links).

• I've observed (across multiple senders and industries) the last CTA in a multi-column, multi-row block outperform every Secondary CTA above it.

Presentation is basically the only limitation for Secondary CTAs here…

One interesting thing: Increasing the number of Secondary CTAs cannot save a weak-performing Primary CTA. Sure, they can nudge your numbers a bit…

💡 But in subscribers' minds, Secondary is always secondary.

5) Secondary CTAs are a treasure trove of information

Primary CTA performance is quite binary in what it can tell you (aka, it either does or does not go over well). Helpful, but only after you do a full-pitch with it.

Secondary CTAs are a different matter entirely.

🧠 Clickers at this level are more intentional and often show (when multiple Secondary CTAs are present) to be more obvious in their interests.

This makes Secondary CTAs the best place to test ideas for later Primary focuses:

• Should you focus on accessories or new dresses?

• Which blog content do they prefer?

• Do your subscribers like how-tos, real-world testimonials, or trivia/games?

Secondary CTAs can tell you that.

💡 If a majority were willing to scroll past other content to click a specific one, you can be more confident there's a genuine interest signal.

How to put these into action

I plan to do a follow-up on this piece discussing some other interesting trends I’ve observed, but for now this will have to suffice.

Alright, enough theory. Here's what to actually do with it:

• Make sure your Primary and Secondary content pieces are clean, well-defined, and skimmable.

• Test whether Primary Content earns the same click when immediately available at open or not.

• Hyperlink using different formats to understand your audience’s preferences for Primary vs Secondary CTAs.

• Include more Secondary content options with diverse options related to content types, formatting, and more.

• Use what you learn to inform personalisation, content ideas, and your CTAs in future campaigns.

🧠 Do this for a couple of months and see what happens.

You’ll find that starting with your feet on the ground is actually the fastest way to get your content to fly.

And when you finally reach the clouds, please ping me on LinkedIn. I’d love to hear what you found.

✅ Whatever you got out of this, at least you can finally stop wasting time picking colours on buttons that didn’t have to be there in the first place.

​

Travis Hazlewood

Travis manages email and SMS deliverability at Ortto (now part of Canva), and has spent the better part of a decade keeping billions of emails landing where they're supposed to.  His motto, "Earn the inbox...then earn more in it", is built on the idea that strong deliverability drives conversions.  Like what you just read? Check out his twice-a-month LinkedIn newsletter, Inboxicated.

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

A big thank you to Travis for this week’s guest post, and I will definitely be reading his follow-up piece in his own newsletter. 🎉

🚨 If there's one number to remember from this piece, it's this: your Primary CTA is doing almost all the work.

A few things worth considering on your next sends:

• Stop assuming "visible at open" = "gets clicked." A big hero image up top doesn't seem to cost you clicks on the button below it; people scroll further than we give them credit for.

• Don't default to one CTA style everywhere. Buttons and linked images aren't interchangeable, and which one wins seems to depend on whether it's your main ask or a supporting one.

• Link count isn't the real villain; clutter is. A messy block of competing links does more damage than simply having a lot of them. **

• Watch where the clicks land in your Secondary section. That's less about optimising and more about listening; it's telling you what to test as your next Primary.

💡 Try this: swap your usual CTA format for a few sends and track whether Primary vs Secondary click share actually shifts.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

** (Thank God, otherwise I’d be in big trouble…my link count is usually more than 30+ links. 😮‍💨)

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• Bounce House - Gmail Reputation Data Is Dead. Now What? (Alison Gootee & Mailgun)

• Omnivery has the Receipts - The click is going the way of the open. (Emailexpert)

• Does It Email? - Popover/Dialog. (Mark Robbins)

• Marketing - Why your Wrapped campaign should start now. (Action Rocket)

• Email List Hygiene - A Step-by-Step Walkthrough (With Real Verification Results). (Kickbox)

• Easy Workaround - Having trouble adding users and domains in GPT V2? (Spam Resource)

• Email Authentication -Email identity and the future of customer trust. (Valimail)

• Catch-All vs. Invalid Emails - The Difference and How to Handle Each. (Zerobounce)

• TechCrunch Reports - Klaviyo Signup Form Shared Passwords With Advertisers. (Emailexpert)

• Rate-th, the Spam Rate Wraith - The Deliverab-Iliad, Chapter Eight. (Alison Gootee)

• Inboxicated - Mummified Lists, Shiny-Object Syndrome, and Ted Lasso. (Travis Hazlewood)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #252 of All About Email!

Last week, we were back with another summer guest author. Robert Brandl has built this awesome Chrome Extension (I use it), and that comes with a serious amount of data, as we looked at what the email platforms behind 16,655 brands can tell us.

This week, I'm returning to the CNIL and Garante tracking pixel story from Issues #238 and #239. The response to those two issues was fantastic, and a lot of what's been written publicly since has left me with a nagging feeling that something important is being missed.

Let’s go! 👇

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Meet customers where they already are, before your competitor does.

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⚠️ Before we get stuck in, I am not a legal professional or a privacy expert (although I am a big privacy advocate, and cover topics like this often), so the below is not legal advice; check with your organisation’s legal support.

If you are not familiar with this topic and you haven’t read Issues #238 and #239, start there before going any further.

The General July 14th Deadline has Passed

🚨 Some important things to note:

• If you didn't notify existing subscribers by July 14th, you can no longer normally rely on the transitional arrangement, although the CNIL allows a reasonably justified extension in limited, documented circumstances.

• Missing it doesn't mean you give up; you've lost the benefit of the transitional arrangement.

• Italy's deadline, October 28th, 2026, is still live. So for those subscribers, there's time. But not as much as it looks.

"Just Identify Your French and Italian Contacts and Disable Tracking"

Since Issues #238 and #239, a common piece of advice has been appearing in articles and social posts:

• Segment your French and Italian subscribers. Disable open tracking for them.

🚨 It sounds practical and actionable. But it rests on a false premise that most articles never actually examine; let me explain:

• A French citizen living in the UK isn't automatically covered because they're French.

• A UK tourist in Paris doesn't need to be French for French law potentially to apply when they open your email.

💡 Nationality, residence, current location, and what's in your CRM are not interchangeable legal tests:

• An @orange[dot]fr address doesn't prove where someone lives, where they are when they open an email, or which law applies to the tracking.

• A Gmail address tells you even less.

• And CRM country fields? They may reflect a billing address, a company headquarters, a sign-up location, or something entered several years ago.

People move. People travel.

The dependency is on other things, which are much harder to segment:

• Where the sender or controller is established.

• Whether it has a relevant EU establishment.

• Which audience it deliberately targets.

• Where the user is located / where the person's behaviour is being monitored.

The CNIL actually made this clearer in its July FAQ. It says French law can apply to a non-EU organisation where pixels are used to monitor the behaviour of people located in France. Article 82 also specifically refers to its competence regarding users located in France.

🚨 Notice the wording: users located in France, not French citizens.

That doesn't mean someone's physical location automatically answers every territorial-scope question. Still, it does reinforce why identifying “French people” by nationality, email domain, or a CRM country field is the wrong starting point.

💡 Domain matching (@orange[dot]fr, @laposte[dot]net) and CRM country fields are useful proxies for identifying who is “likely” in France.

The advice isn't completely wrong. But you're making an educated guess, not achieving legal certainty, and you should frame it as such rather than present it as a complete compliance solution.

This is exactly the point Lauren Meyer raised back in April: determining who is "French" at the time of interaction isn't straightforward.

🤔 It's one reason a single global standard starts to look more defensible than segmenting by geography.

IP Geolocation Doesn't Solve It Either

The obvious response is: "use IP data to work out where someone is when they open."

Here's the problem with that:

The IP address is received when the remote image is requested. The tracking pixel has already fired before you can use the IP to estimate where the recipient might be.

🤔 You can't use data collected through a tracking operation to decide retrospectively whether that tracking operation should have happened.

And even setting that aside, IP geolocation in email is increasingly unreliable:

• Apple Mail Privacy Protection, Gmail image proxying, security scanners, VPNs, corporate networks, and mobile carrier routing can all obscure the real location.

• For Apple Mail users with MPP enabled, a significant chunk of most newsletter audiences, the IP your ESP logs is Apple's proxy server, not the user's IP address.

🚨 As I mentioned in Issue #238, MPP already compromised open rate.

The same problem that broke your open rate is now breaking your compliance location signal.

Where the ESPs Are, And Where Some Aren't

This isn't just me arguing that ESPs need to build better controls. In its July FAQ, the CNIL specifically tells service providers that their products should make it easier for customers to comply.

It says providers should offer functionality that supports:

• Disabling trackers.

• Treating recipients differently within the same mailing list.

• Managing mailing lists based on a consent signal where consent is required

• And Privacy by design and by default.

💡 The CNIL also says providers may offer functionality to collect that consent.

Since Issues #238 and #239, I've been watching which platforms have actually moved on this, although the below is not an exhaustive list:

Klaviyo

• Per-recipient open-tracking controls and account-wide disabling are live, although recipient-level consent currently has to be populated via data import/sync or API

• Native collection of open-tracking consent through Klaviyo sign-up forms is still listed as part of its next phase of work.

Customer[dot]io

• Supports workspace-level tracking defaults, plus a per-contact consent attribute that can override those defaults.

• That consent status can be updated via the API or imports, and recipients can manage their tracking preferences through a hosted consent page linked in the email footer.

• Customer[dot]o also supports disabling tracking at the individual message level.

💡 That gives it a reasonably complete consent-management model: a default policy, recipient-level overrides, and a way for subscribers to change their preference themselves.

The remaining question I’d still like answered is whether withdrawing consent also neutralises tracking of emails already in the inbox, which the CNIL now expects providers to handle.

HubSpot

• HubSpot appears to support disabling tracking at the individual email level. Still, I haven't found clear public documentation showing a native per-contact open-tracking consent control equivalent to what Klaviyo or Brevo now offer.

• That means the practical workaround still seems to involve sending separately configured tracked and untracked versions of an email to different audience segments.

• The problem, as we've already discussed, is that this pushes the hard part back onto the marketer: how do you reliably determine which contacts should receive the untracked version in the first place?

💡 Until HubSpot documents a true recipient-level tracking-consent mechanism, I'd treat its current position as more of a campaign-level workaround than a complete consent-management solution.

Mailchimp

• Has a per-campaign toggle for marketing emails: manual, no global or segment-level kill switch.

• Mailchimp Transactional/Mandrill does have global Sending Defaults for open tracking, plus per-message API/SMTP overrides.

Brevo

• Per-contact consent for email open and click tracking is now supported, with Yes/No/Unknown consent states stored for each contact.

• Consent can be collected through Brevo sign-up forms and update-profile forms, and recipients can withdraw tracking consent through a dedicated link in the email footer.

• Brevo also supports API-based consent updates and lets senders decide how to treat contacts with an Unknown tracking status.

• Brevo strongly recommends setting the default for Unknown contacts to No, so tracking is not enabled unless a positive consent signal exists.

💡 That puts Brevo much closer to the recipient-level model the regulators are asking ESPs to support, rather than relying on a blanket country segment or account-wide switch-off.

Brevo’s implementation covers both open and click tracking, which is broader than Klaviyo’s current documented recipient-level control, which is specifically focused on open tracking.

🧠 That distinction is useful because it shows different ESPs are interpreting and implementing the regulatory requirements differently.

The Sound of Silence (Love that song!)

🚨 And then there are the platforms that have said nothing, including Beehiiv, my ESP.

There's no documentation of tracking consent controls, no per-contact suppression, no global tracking disable for email opens, and no public statement about CNIL compliance that I can find.

But Beehiiv isn't alone. Several platforms are in the same position, and if you're on one of them, the questions I'm raising here apply just as much to you.

💡 French compliance consultancy Dipeeo goes further in its CNIL guide. It recommends that if your email platform cannot disable tracking pixels or otherwise implement the required controls, you should consider whether the provider remains suitable for your compliance needs.

Dipeeo links that back to Article 28 GDPR, which requires controllers to use processors that provide sufficient guarantees around appropriate technical and organisational measures.

🚨 That does not mean Article 28 automatically says “your ESP has no tracking toggle, therefore you must leave.” The assessment is broader and depends on the processing, available safeguards, and how the service is configured.

But if your ESP cannot technically enable you to comply with a regulatory requirement, processor suitability becomes a legitimate question.

I’m not saying switch… I’m saying it’s a question worth asking.

Before You Go

That’s a lot to take in, and I have even more to say on the topic. 😂

A lot of the compliance guides that have appeared since July 14th are genuinely well-intentioned (like my articles), and some have useful platform-specific detail.

But the “identify your French contacts and segment them” framing that runs through almost everything is not the complete answer; it’s a practical starting point.

💡 The IP chicken-and-egg problem, where the pixel has already fired before you can determine location, is a gap that almost no article addresses.

So, I’ll leave you with this:

• The same privacy technologies that destroyed the accuracy of open-rate measurement also undermine IP-based attempts to decide whether somebody should be tracked.

• And if identifying the “right” recipients isn’t dependable, and your ESP cannot manage consent properly at the recipient level, there is another option: stop tracking opens altogether.

That comes with consequences of its own, of course.

But maybe the answer to a tracking-consent problem isn’t better geographical tracking. Maybe it’s accepting that open tracking isn’t worth preserving in its current form.

🫠 I’m going to guess this is where some of us are right now:

• Making an informed estimate using imperfect tools, given that the CNIL is aware of these technical limitations.

• Documenting what you’re doing, reducing the risks you can, and actively trying to close the gaps is clearly better than ignoring the issue altogether. But it still isn’t the same as meeting all applicable requirements.

🤔 Is this where most of us will sit until ESPs catch up?

For some platforms, that’s happening now. For others, including mine, we’re still waiting.

And in a couple of weeks, I’m going to look at the other option properly: what actually happens if we switch off open tracking?

That's it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Yesterday's TLDR AI newsletter is today's team meeting

The tool your team adopts next quarter is in today's issue. TLDR AI is curated by Anthropic and ex-Google engineers and read by 1.1M+ people who like being first. Free, daily.

Subscribe for free

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• It’s not about spam word - What do you think you can change in your email program this week? (Edward Ma)

• EVP Update - Food for thought. (Kyle Renfrew)

• The Easiest Mistake? - Google Adds New Gmail Warning To Help Prevent BCC Privacy Mistake. (Forbes)

• Forced Dark Mode - Confusing, isn’t it? (Mark Robbins)

• Gmail Blue Checkmarks - Why Are Major Brands Letting Them Expire? (Emailtooltester)

• Visibility - Add a sign-up to your header or nav. (Inbox Collective)

• Is it even worth it? - A/B testing...wasted or worth the hype? (Email Advice in Your Inbox)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #251 of All About Email!

Last week, I celebrated a huge milestone for this newsletter, and one that I never thought would even be possible. I reflected, celebrated and made some predictions after 250 issues!!! 🎉

This week, we are back with another summer guest author. Robert Brandl has built this awesome Chrome Extension (I use it), and that comes with a serious amount of data. Let’s see what the email platforms behind 16,655 brands can tell us.

Let’s go! 👇

That lead in your CRM? Gone.

Over 3.5 billion people open WhatsApp, Instagram, or Facebook Messenger every day. Your customers are already there, asking questions and comparing options.

Wati puts your business across WhatsApp, Instagram DM, Facebook Messenger, SMS, RCS, and web chat in one AI-powered inbox.

Automations instantly respond, route conversations, and keep every interaction tracked in one place.

Meet customers where they already are, before your competitor does.

See All Wati Channels

Here's a question I can never resist

For years, I answered that by digging through raw email sources. Then I got tired of it and built a free Chrome extension that does it for me.

It's called Email Detective, used by more than 700 people already. It anonymously records which platform sent the email, how quickly it arrived, and where it landed.

📊 That's now added up to:

• More than 16,655 brands,

• Across 135 different email platforms,

• And close to 160,000 detections so far.

So I pulled the data. Some of it confirmed what I expected. Some genuinely surprised me.

(Quick note: this is what our users' inboxes show, not a perfect census of the internet. But it's a big enough pile to spot real patterns.)

Here are seven things worth knowing. 👇

1. In marketing platforms, Klaviyo is running away with it

Here's the top 10 by number of brands:

1. Klaviyo (23.1%) - 1,767 brands

2. Mailchimp (15.9%) - 1,214

3. Salesforce Marketing Cloud (14.7%) - 1,127

4. HubSpot (11.5%) - 879

5. Braze (7.1%) - 545

6. Iterable (6.3%) - 482

7. Brevo (6.2%) - 472

8. Kit (5.8%) - 442

9. Substack (5.3%) - 402

10. Customer[dot]io (4.1%) - 313

🍌 Mailchimp is still the name everyone's aunt has heard of.

But 45% more brands use Klaviyo, and the backstory explains why:

2. But the real giants don't market themselves at all

🚨 Here's the twist. The two platforms that send to more brands than any other, including marketing tools, are:

• SendGrid (2,113 brands),

• and Amazon SES (1,966 brands).

Both beat Klaviyo, and either is an "email marketing" tool the way we usually mean it.

🛠️ They're transactional infrastructure. The quiet plumbing your dev team wires up for password resets, order confirmations, and shipping updates.

Looking at high-volume senders, Amazon SES actually pulls ahead of SendGrid: nearly 25,000 email sightings compared to SendGrid's 22,270.

3. Even the email companies don't use their own email tool

Here’s a funny observation. You would assume market leader Klaviyo also uses its own product for its own email marketing.

💡 They do, but:

• Klaviyo routes partner communications through HubSpot 96% of the time, rather than its own product.

• Omnisend also uses HubSpot for the entire welcome series for new customers.

• Beehiiv's marketing emails run through Customer[dot]io.

• One entire slice of Braze's own mail (the email[dot]braze[dot]com sender domain) runs 100% through Marketo.

I'm not here to dunk. There are usually real reasons (lifecycle email, sales, and marketing owning different systems).

🧠 But it's a good reminder that "best tool for the job" isn't always "the tool we sell," even within the companies that sell it.

4. Nearly half of the brands haven't locked down DMARC

This one's less fun and more important.

😬 45% of brands have no enforced DMARC. Their policy is set to "none" or missing entirely, which means it monitors but blocks nothing. The other 55% are configured to prevent domain spoofing.

And to be clear, most of that 45% isn't made up of brands skipping DMARC entirely:

• 42% publish a record but leave it at "none-monitor-only, and never tighten it.

• Only 2.7% have no record at all.

Either way, to a spoofer, "none" and "no record" look the same.

🔓 The door's unlocked. If you do one thing after reading this, check your own domain's policy.

5. We all know the open rate is inflated, but it’s also undercounting

You've probably heard that open rates run a bit inflated because of Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, which auto-loads images (including the tracking pixel) whether someone actually opens the email or not.

💡 What's less known: the opposite also happens. If images don't load, the tracking pixel never fires, and that open never gets counted, even though a real person is reading the email right now.

Thanks to Email Detective, we know how often that happens:

• In Gmail, images get blocked about 5% of the time.

• In Outlook, it's closer to 12%, more than double.

🧠 Here's what that means in practice:

• Say you have 1,000 subscribers, 700 on Gmail and 300 on Outlook, and your dashboard reports a 40% open rate. That's 400 counted opens: 280 from Gmail, 120 from Outlook.

• But some real opens were never counted because the images (and the tracking pixel) didn't load. Add those back in, roughly 5% more on top of the Gmail number and 12% more on top of the Outlook number, and you get closer to 432 real opens.

🚨 So a dashboard showing 40% is probably closer to a real open rate of 43%. Not a huge gap, but it adds up.

6. Early Outlook data: Emails land in spam roughly 7x more than in Gmail

Everyone doing email marketing has a sense that Outlook is stricter about spam than Gmail.

💡 Now there's a number: roughly 13% of email users' opens landed in spam in Outlook during our testing, versus 1.8% in Gmail. Roughly 7-8x higher.

Broken authentication makes it worse everywhere, but the stakes are much bigger on Outlook. Brands with weak or missing DMARC saw close to 20% of their mail land in spam folders.

🚨 Even brands with solid auth still lost about 9%, several times Gmail's rate for brands with no enforcement at all.

ℹ️ Our Outlook data is newer and smaller than our Gmail data, so this will get more precise over time.

But if a meaningful chunk of your list reads on Outlook, this is your reminder to actually check your setup there instead of assuming what works for Gmail carries over.

7. AMP for Email is, let's be honest, dead

🔮 Remember when AMP for Email was supposed to revolutionise the inbox? Interactive carousels, live forms, the works?

• Out of 17,000+ brands we've checked, 44 use it. That's a quarter of one per cent.

I'm not saying it's useless. I'm saying almost nobody has decided it's worth the engineering effort. File it next to the other "future of email" promises that quietly never arrived.

Want to check any of this yourself?

Every number above came from Email Detective.

It's free, it lives inside Gmail and Outlook, and when you open any email, you'll see the platform that sent it, the auth setup (SPF, DKIM, DMARC with alignment, BIMI), the template builder, delivery time, and even the sending IP.

🪄 Handy for competitive research, deliverability checks, or just being nosy about the brands you follow.

👉 Grab Email Detective for Gmail or Outlook.

And if you spot something the data can't explain, let me know! I'm always digging.

Thanks for having me, Simon. 🙏

​

Robert Brandl

Robert Brandl is the founder of EmailTooltester, where he's been testing email marketing tools for 15+ years. He also built Email Detective, a free Chrome extension that reveals the platform behind any newsletter in Gmail (and now Outlook too).

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

This is not a sponsored post, and I genuinely use the Chrome Extension. In fact, I was able to use it to show Knak why their marketing emails were going straight to my spam:

• Failed SPF alignment

• No one-click unsubscribe

🚨 It is important to note that this data comes from the user base of the Chrome Extension, and it’s not necessarily representative of the wider email ecosystem, but still it has some excellent datapoints:

• SendGrid and Amazon SES send to more brands than any marketing platform, including Klaviyo. They're just infrastructure, not "email marketing" in the usual sense.

• 45% of brands have no enforced DMARC. Most have a policy in place; it's just set to monitor-only, watching for spoofing but blocking nothing. Only a small fraction (2.7%) skip DMARC entirely.

• Image-blocking undercounts opens: ~5% on Gmail, ~12% on Outlook. A reported 40% open rate is likely closer to 43% in reality.

• Outlook spam placement runs far higher than Gmail: ~13% vs ~1.8% in this testing, and even well-authenticated brands still saw ~9% land in spam.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• AI Email Design with Postcards - Describe the Email. Watch it Build. (Designmodo)

• TIL - Newer 'sequence' emojis will fall back to regular emoji combos when not supported by the client. (Kyle Renfrow)

• Gmail - ISP deliverability guide. (Bento)

• Which One Is Right For You? - The Best FREE Newsletter Platforms in 2026. (EmailTooltester)

• 102 Posts Per Week! - The 36k Subscriber Content Machine. (Growth In Reverse)

• Agree or Disagree? - Marketing in a World Without Email. (Kate Barrett)

• Microsoft's S775 - The Undocumented Rate Limit That Keeps Coming Back. (Engagor)

• The Newsletter System Blueprint - The 5-step system to turn your newsletter into something people trust and buy from. (Kyle Adams/Creator Glue)

• The Margin - Why I Finally Started a Newsletter. (EmailBoutique)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #250 of All About Email!

Last week, my fourth guest in our summer series was Nikki Elbaz, as we explored what SaaS and e-commerce can learn from each other when it comes to email.

This week I’m celebrating a huge milestone for this newsletter, and one that I never thought would even be possible. Join me as I celebrate, reflect and make some predictions after 250 issues!!! 🎉

Let’s go! 👇

Celebrating Over 5 Years of Writing!

So, where do you go after 250 issues?…

I guess the next ambitious step is 500 issues. 💪

What Have I Learned?

A huge amount. 😂

Have I made mistakes?… Absolutely!

Probably a lot more mistakes than I’d like. Although I’ve learned from my mistakes, so that’s a positive. 😉

250 issues is over five years of writing (I've taken a couple of very short breaks over the Christmas period each year). It's a number that I honestly couldn't even fathom when I started this newsletter.

Wow! 🎉

My Other “Failed”(?) Newsletters

I started three other newsletters in that space of time, and every single one of those has fallen by the wayside:

• Loop WP made it to 210 issues (I still publish an issue privately from time to time).

• A Journey Into The Unknown made it to 31 issues (and I’m working on bringing it back).

• “Find It Fridays” made it to 35 issues (it was a newsletter about technical SEO).

Consistency is Hard… & more Reflections!

💡 I think being that consistent for over five years is something that is rarely seen, but I think one of the biggest bits of learning has been how this newsletter has changed since it started over five years ago.

• It's far more mature (as it should be),

• It has changed ESPs,

• Been rebranded three times,

• and now settled on its identity in terms of branding, naming, tone of voice, audience, and all those kinds of important things.

Is it hyper-niched?… No, and maybe to its detriment. 🤔

(A generalist newsletter can be hard to grow.)

Doing It Differently?

🚨 If I were starting this newsletter now, it would be done completely differently than when I started over five years ago.

In the last two years, I've seen this newsletter be transformed, and a lot of that is down to me actually practising what I preach/teach.

I think that's something we're often guilty of: we spend so much time helping others and helping our clients that we don't actually invest that time in ourselves.

💡 If I were to start this newsletter again now, I would give it a much better foundation than I did at the beginning. I would:

• Have a logo and branding (branding is more than a logo),

• A vision and purpose for the newsletter (this is a big one!),

• A good domain name,

• An ESP that meets my needs,

• A decent website and landing page(s),

• Push my newsletter on socials (it took me a long time to do this),

• Monetise it much quicker,

• …and possibly paid acquisition, boosts and referrals… i.e. Ads (not purchasing a list…never)

Taking Joy in Writing and Community

🤷‍♂️ Even when things are really good, there are still times when you're just, "Oh, this is a bit of a slog."

Thankfully, those times are few and far between, and we're in the middle of one of my favourite periods of the year: the guest summer series.

💡 It's wonderful because we get to mix up guest authors with my own issues. And whenever I have the guest authors on, I also take those opportunities to add my own voice to their issues.

❤️ I think it's been one of the most joyful things: building out a community around this newsletter, even though I've been talking about building an actual online community for what must be 18 months now, maybe even longer.

(That's certainly something that I'll be looking at in a lot more detail, and I'll be revealing more on that soon.)

Some Predictions and the AI Future

🧠 I think it's never been easier to start a newsletter, and it's never been easier to get involved in email marketing. However, I also don't think it's ever been harder to reach the inbox and, more importantly, engage our audience.

Now we have this advent of a new audience type that gets to your content first, and that's the AI inbox. That's a very different audience to address, and it's whether we embrace that in the future or we ignore it.

🚨 I think those who ignore the AI inbox and those who ignore AI are going to struggle in the future.

I'm not going to go into that in more detail in this issue of the newsletter. But I will stress that:

• I think AI has to be used ethically.

• I think AI can't be a necessary replacement for humans (so please don't get me wrong and jump down my throat),

• I’m also not saying we must use AI for everything and that AI is always awesome, because we shouldn't, and it isn’t.

AI is definitely not as awesome as a lot of people think it is. Maybe one day we'll get there; the future is both exciting and daunting in the newsletter space.

🤔 I think we're going to see a lot of SaaS products, businesses, and newsletter tools come and go, and there will be casualties, but I also think the industry's going to come out stronger.

I just hope that as newsletters change and become more AI-assisted, and more content is written by AI, we recognise that we have to strike a fine balance between human writing and AI assistance, and not just producing AI slop.

🚨 We can’t lose ourselves, our opinions and our ability to think critically for the sake of convenience.

Email is a wonderful channel where we can build a unique and authentic relationship and a real connection.

For a long time, we've been seeing open rates, click rates, and so much more become unreliable.

We must now look towards more accurate and representative engagement signals that allow us to strengthen those connections.

🚨 We’ve had this wonderful piece of technology for decades, and I think it's going to be here for decades to come, but we are in a new era of email marketing that comes with even greater responsibility than the period before.

The Road to 500 is Paved with Thanks!

I do have some exciting plans for the future, and I hope to reveal those soon. 🤫

I want to thank all of you who have been along for the ride.

❤️ It's certainly a pleasure to write this newsletter every week and to talk with you via replies in the inbox and on social media.

I look at my subscriber base and see so many people who have come across from the original Mailchimp days back at the start (there's still a good proportion of you here).

And to all who joined more recently or have been around for the last couple of years on Beehiiv, I appreciate you just as much.

It's been an absolute blessing. Thank you very much.

Thank you for five years, and here's to the next five! 🎉

🎶 Enjoy this week’s song; it’s an absolute banger and very apt!

That's it for this week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Don't be behind at the next campaign review

Your team is already testing the channel you haven't read about yet. TLDR Marketing is the 5-minute daily brief that keeps you ahead. Free, and read by 330K+ marketers.

Subscribe for free

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🤯 Yes…Subject Lines - Costco just paid $14,000,000 for their email subject lines. (Anna Levitin)

• 2026 Report - Marketing Production in the Age of AI. (Knak)

• The Context Box - Do It, But Right. (Spam Resource & Dylan Redekop)

• Apple iCloud - ISP Deliverability Guide. (Bento)

• July 2026 - Creative of the Month. (ActionRocket)

• It’s Not AI - The 36k Subscriber Content Machine. (Growth In Reverse)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #249 of All About Email!

🎉 Only one issue to go until the big 250!!! 🎉

Last week was my third guest author of the summer and arguably the founder of my summer series (thank you, Vicky) as we explored the “accidental oops” email.

This week is my fourth guest in our summer series, Nikki Elbaz, as we explore what SaaS and Ecommerce can learn from each other when it comes to email.

Let’s go! 👇

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SaaS, Meet Ecommerce. Ecommerce, Meet SaaS

One of the funnest parts of hosting a podcast? Playing with popular AI music generator Suno to make the background music.

🎶 (My husband thinks the track I landed on sounds like The Little Mermaid’s “Under the Sea.” Please tell me you don’t agree.) 

But it’s not all fun and games, so when I finished exporting my files – commercial rights in hand – I switched back to the free plan. 

🚨 And Step 2 of their downgrade flow totally surprised me: 

👀 You’re seeing it right. 

They offered to pause my subscription. Not cancel. Pause.

🤔 In SaaS. How often do you see that?

If you've ever subscribed to Dollar Shave Club or Butcher Box, or any of the million ecomm subscription boxes out there, that pause button is as familiar as their monthly delivery emails.

🚨 In ecomm, "not now" doesn’t have to mean "goodbye forever”, and according to research from Eightx, that pause button helps them retain 9-22% of churning subscribers. 

Yet SaaS has no such lever. 

💡 SaaS can copy some great moves from the ecomm playbook, and ecomm can do the same from the SaaS playbook.

The industries share so many similarities (to name a few):

• Subscription models,

• Value-driven,

• Churn obsession…

…that the two are uniquely able to swipe successful strategies from each other. 

Here’s a sampling: 

2 Things Ecomm Should Steal From SaaS

“Time To Value” Is Your New North Star

🚨 SaaS is obsessed with the “aha” moment, the moment a new user hits the point where the product feels necessary.

Obviously, Trial Starts are measured, but they don’t hold a candle to the attention that “Time to Value” is given. 

🎉 Ecomm, though, celebrates the first purchase. 

Yet, the real value isn’t checkout; neither for the brand, nor the customer. Rather, it’s when the product delivers… um, value. When the serum brightens her skin, when the knife cuts his prep time.

That’s not at purchase, and it’s not even at delivery. 

💡 Sell the win they already paid for before you sell the repeat purchase.

Initial emails should drive toward that value discovery; send tutorials, case studies, and check-ins before you jump to the "20% off your next order."

✅ Focus your emails on driving that value, and reap the LTV. 

Turn Your Content Calendar Into A Map 

🧠 Because the only way to drive towards value is to pay attention to where your user is sitting, SaaS lives on behavioural triggers: emails that fire based on what a subscriber actually did, not just because the content calendar lists a send.

Ecomm has all the user behaviour it needs to do the same, and mostly ignores it for blast campaigns. 

💡 The most-left-on-the-table flow? Replenishment.

If someone buys a 30-day supply, you know roughly when they'll run out. Trigger a reminder at Day 23  (you can be fancy and call it order gap analysis), and you land in the inbox at the exact moment of need.

🚨 The ROI is almost unfair: replenishment reminders convert at 8-15% (Ometria), versus 1-3% for a general promo send (HelloRetail).

Sure, some shops run them like clockwork, but not as many as you’d expect with numbers that good. 

2 Things SaaS Should Steal From Ecomm

Stop Nurturing Leads 

Whenever I suggest an abandoned cart flow to a SaaS, the response I get is something like: “Abandoned cart? Those are for ecomm! We can’t track intent the way they can.”

🤔 Mmmhmm. You're tracking MQLs and SQLs. You know who hit the pricing page, who started a trial and stalled, who opened the plan comparison three times. You have all the intent data for a gorgeous abandonment flow. 

💡 What SaaS is actually missing is ecomm's nerve.

When a shopper abandons cart, ecomm knows they were this close, so the emails sell: they surface objections, play up the motivation, drop a coupon. Whatever it takes to drive the purchase. 

When a SaaS lead stalls? The brand tucks them into a gentle 90-day nurture that delivers content piece after content piece, and never actually makes the ask. 

Nurtures have their place, sure. But a high-intent lead who just bounced off your pricing page doesn't need to “warm up.”

💡 They need you to answer the objections, make them look good for putting you on the shortlist, and for you to ask for the close.

Put The “Life” Back In Lifecycle 

• Ecomm emails never die. For better or for worse, once you’re on a list, you can expect multiple emails a week.

• SaaS, though, front-loads communication into onboarding, then goes quiet, save for an occasional launch announcement or feature update. 

🧠 Nobody's watching for expansion opportunities, the SaaS equivalent of a repeat purchase:

• Like the power user who suddenly logs in twice as often.

• The champion who got a new job with a team 3x the size.

• Or the team who slowly outgrew its plan. 

I built a whole framework around those moments (I call them Change Flags), but you don't need a 9-part framework to start.

You just need to broaden the goal of lifecycle to include more than initial onboarding. 

Think “Inside the Inbox”

🚨 Every artist knows that the best inspiration is found outside their studio.

• So Ecommers, next time you’re about to scroll RGE, take a look at your SaaS subscriptions instead.

• And SaaSers, take this as an excuse to do a little inbox window-shopping.

💡 Steal shamelessly from cross-industry emails. Your CTR will thank you for it.

Simon, thanks for having me (and for the excuse to nerd out over email).

Nikki

Nikki Elbaz

Nikki Elbaz hosts Churn Flags, a podcast that turns 3-star reviews into real growth experiments for teams at brands like Storylane and Bitly. As a retention and expansion strategist and creator of the Change Flags™ framework, she helps mature SaaS teams close recurring NRR gaps. She shares what she’s learning in real time at nikkielbaz.com/subscribe.

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

❤️ Before we go any further, I am a massive Disney fan and fondly remember (yes, I’m old) going to see the original “The Little Mermaid” in my local cinema, and “Under the Sea” is one of my favourite Disney songs.

Jodi Benson 👑

Anyway, back to Nikki, and thank you again for being a guest author!

Here are three of Nikki’s standout points for me:

1) 🚨 The pause option is such a simple idea, yet it makes complete sense. Someone needing to stop paying right now doesn’t necessarily mean they’re finished with the brand forever. E-commerce understands that much better than SaaS seems to.

2) 💡 I also really like the point about “time to value”.

We treat the purchase as the win, when the real win is the customer actually getting the result they paid for. That means the first emails should be about tutorials, case studies and check-ins, not a 20% off code before they've even used the thing.

3) 🧠 "Stop nurturing leads." There's a real difference between warming someone up and being too polite to ask for the sale. A stalled trial user who's hit your pricing page three times isn't cold; they're sitting right there.

- - - - - - - - -

🤔 So if you work in e-commerce or SaaS and next time you're building a flow, ask which industry would handle this moment better, yours or the one next door.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}, for Issue 250! 🤯 🎉

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• The future of deliverability with Laura Atkins - Why reputation will matter more than authentication. (Stripo)

• Uh-oh! - Apple’s Hide My Email fix is disputed after post-patch reproduction. (Emailexpert)

• ✅ Relatively straightforward - The Minimum Email Authentication Every Brand Should Implement. (EmailKarma)

• Email Health Check - How to Audit Your Email Program Before Deliverability Suffers. (ZeroBounce)

• LB's Laws of Deliverability - Definitely “don’t ignore these”, an excellent list! (LoriBeth Blair)

• Another Layer - What the new DMARC np= tag means for email security. (Valimail)

• 💡 Today I Learned - The UK’s New Data Complaints Duty Is a Month Old. It Lands on Marketing Teams First. (Emailexpert)

• From DKIM to DKIM2 - What Senders Need to Know Now and What Mailbox Providers Expect. (Certified Senders Alliance)

• Visibility Factor - How AI reads your email before you do. (Knak)

• Top Email Marketing Platforms - These 7 Are Worth Your Money in 2026. (Inc)

• The Reputation Sisyphus - The Deliverab-Iliad, Chapter Four. (Alison Gootee)

• ISP update - Gmail’s 0.1% spam threshold just became a warning, not a target. (Emailexpert)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #248 of All About Email!

Last week was my second guest author of the summer, as we took a look at “Why Being In The Right Room Changes Everything You Know About Email.”

This week, I have my third guest author of the summer and arguably the founder of my summer series (thank you, Vicky) as we explore the “accidental oops” email.

Let’s go! 👇

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We cover the channels that move your numbers: paid, SEO, email, social, and ecommerce. Whether you work in B2B or B2C, in-house or agency-side, pick the stories that match your work.

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My Podcast Vault Obsession

Some people curate musical playlists for background vibes when working. Others tune into those special mHz "focus frequencies." Me? Most days, I'm deep in repeats of Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant, and Karl Pilkington's early-2000s radio show on the XFM vault.

After enough hours listening to those shows, Ricky's business skills become as obvious as his comedic ones.

Long before social media became the default marketing channel, he'd regularly tell listeners to visit his website, join his mailing list, and sign up for updates.

🎉 So when Ricky launched Dutch Barn Vodka and started actively growing an email list, I was delighted. Actually, delighted might be understating it.

I've spent the last eight months talking about how much Ricky Gervais talks about his email list. Ask anyone who's been on a client call with me recently, and they've probably heard me mention it 😅.

I even wrote a blog on it.

So, Why Was I Disappointed?

So you can imagine my disappointment when an "oops" email from Dutch Barn Vodka landed in my inbox in June.

Not because they sent an oops email. That part I get. Every marketer has been there in some form or another.

😔 No, I was disappointed because this wasn't a genuine oops email.

The message explained that a product launch email had been accidentally sent and that some subscribers may have briefly seen something they weren't supposed to see.

The good news was that they had managed to pull it back. The bad news was that a small group may have caught a glimpse of it before it was recalled.

There's Just One Problem

🚨 Dutch Barn uses Klaviyo as their ESP. And once an email has been delivered from Klaviyo, it can't be pulled back out of someone's inbox.

You can stop a send mid-flight. You can halt what's still queued. But you can't reach into thousands of inboxes and retrieve something that's already landed.

(I triple checked my inboxes for the email they said they'd accidentally sent. It wasn't there.)

🤷‍♀️ So in this case, that "oops" almost certainly never existed.

But most subscribers won't think about that. They're not sitting there wondering about email infrastructure or delivery mechanics. They'll read it, smile, and move on.

💡 But that's exactly what makes it interesting, and slightly uncomfortable.

The email's effectiveness relies on people accepting its framing at face value. It borrows credibility from the idea that something accidental and slightly chaotic just happened behind the scenes.

This Isn't New

We've seen the "we accidentally sent this to our entire list" email become its own little genre.

Charlotte Tilbury has used variations of it. Steven Bartlett and Diary of a CEO communications have leaned into similar "leaked" or "not meant for you" framing.

They do the rounds on LinkedIn every time one pops up.

🤔 For me, the real question isn't whether fake oops emails “work”:

• The question is whether they're worth it.

🚨 Whether they're building the kind of relationship you actually want with your subscribers.

The Real Lesson Here

🧠 Curiosity is powerful. It's one of the most reliable tools in email marketing for driving opens. But curiosity doesn't need to be built on pretending something happened when it didn't.

The best emails I've seen over the years don't rely on manufactured accidents.

They lean into things that are already inherently interesting: a real customer question, a genuine behind-the-scenes moment, an actual mistake, a strong opinion, a launch delay that genuinely changed plans.

🎉 In other words, something real. And you can feel that difference as a reader.

Even if you're not consciously analysing it, there's a sense that what you're reading is grounded in something that actually happened versus something constructed to look like it did.

🫠 That's why this one bugged me.

Dutch Barn has already proven it doesn't need this kind of framing to be interesting. The voice is strong. The humour is strong. The audience is already engaged.

💡 So the fake mistake feels less like a clever play and more like an unnecessary one.

I'm a fan of curiosity in email. I'll always be a fan of curiosity in email. I just don't think it ever needs to be smuggled in as an "oops" to do its job.

What are your thoughts, {{first_name|friend}}?

Vicky Smith

Vicky Smith

Vicky Smith is an email strategist and the founder of Flic Email. She works with founders launching or scaling ecommerce brands, helping them build smart, customer-focused email strategies that drive sales on autopilot.

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

What I found most interesting here is that this isn’t really a debate about whether fake “oops” emails generate opens. They probably do.

💡 It’s about what happens when a brand borrows trust to create curiosity.

The technical details about Klaviyo are what initially expose the tactic, but the bigger issue is the relationship being built with the subscriber.

🚨 Most people receiving the email won’t know that a delivered campaign can’t simply be pulled back from their inbox. They’re being asked to accept the story because it sounds plausible.

And that feels particularly unnecessary in this case.

Dutch Barn already has Ricky Gervais, a distinctive voice, plenty of humour and an audience that appears genuinely interested in what the brand is doing. There must be dozens of real stories, opinions, and behind-the-scenes moments they could use to spark curiosity without having to manufacture one.

✅ That’s the lesson I’d take from this:

• Curiosity is one of the most useful tools we have in email marketing, but it works best when there’s something real waiting on the other side.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Simon

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

The Veldt - 8 Minute Edit

deadmau5, Chris James · 5 years of mau5 · Song · 2014

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Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🐝 Get 20% off - Beehiiv’s Summer Release event unveiled Communities and so much more, use code: SRE2026 for 20% off annual plans or use my link for 20% off for 3 months. (Beehiiv)

• Prefetch is not fake engagement - MPP Gave Email Its Best Spam-Folder Signal Yet. (Dela Quist)

• The Hot Seat - Stop Ignoring the $1.3 Trillion Gap with Sarah Gallardo. (Making Sense of Martech & Sarah Gallardo)

• 🔥 Video in Email Special - Jay Oram walks us through how Action Rocket makes video work in email, with Part One also available. (ActionRocket)

• Reduce Churn - Trial Expiration Email Best Practices. (Bento)

• 🔐 Protect Your Organisation - How generative AI is changing phishing attacks. (Valimail)

• Newsletter Success Stories - How Richard Rushfield Grew The Ankler From a Tiny Newsletter Into a Multimillion Dollar Media Company. (Inbox Collective)

• A Complete Guide - The Anatomy of a Good Email. (Litmus)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #247 of All About Email!

Last week was one of my favourite newsletters of the year, and it only comes out twice a year as we look back at your Top 10 issues over the last six months and what we can learn and apply.

This week, I have my second guest author of the summer as we take a look at “Why Being In The Right Room Changes Everything You Know About Email.”

Let’s go! 👇

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Why Being In The Right Room Changes Everything You Know About Email

There's a version of email marketing advice that goes something like this:

Yeah, if you’ve been sending emails for a while, you’ll likely realise this sounds familiar. And, yes, some of it is even true.

🧠 But there’s a word that crops up in our game that we hate to love, but it’s true…it “depends”.

It depends on your audience, your sending context, your list health, your ESP, your goals, and your philosophy, too.

💡 The problem isn't the advice itself, but that most email advice is written for everyone (which means it's really written for no one in particular). And yet, people follow it religiously.

But you don’t know what you don’t know…and I get that.

When you're starting out (or even when you're a few years in), you want that playbook, don’t you? You want someone to tell you the rules and what “works”. And yes, the internet is very willing to oblige.

Heck, there are a million blog posts, YouTube videos, LinkedIn carousels, and now, AI tools that will confidently generate a "complete email marketing strategy" in approximately 11 seconds.

💡 The confidence of advice, however, has nothing to do with its relevance to YOUR situation.

There’s An Advice Problem

I've spent a fair share of time in email (giving away my age here, too). Over that time, one thing has become increasingly clear: the divide between people who are genuinely good at email and people who “think” they're good at email is wider than most realise.

…And it only gets wider.

💡 Not because email is getting harder (though it is, in some ways), but because the volume of advice has exploded, and most people have no real framework for assessing whether what they're reading applies to them (thanks, AI).

Think about it. You ask AI to write your re-engagement sequence, and it'll produce something technically coherent. But it won't:

• Ask you about your list size,

• Your typical engagement curve,

• Your sender reputation and how that’s managed,

• Or whether your audience actually responds to specific content and copy.

🚨 That fancy MCP also can’t tell the difference between a bot click and a real person (or those lurkers who care but don’t click). It can't. So it defaults to the pattern it's seen most often.

That's not a knock on AI (heck, I use my fair share for various aspects of my email strategy), but it's a knock on using it without the literacy to evaluate what comes out.

The same applies to blogs and LinkedIn advice (guilty, occasionally), and industry reports. A screenshot of success may not be success for YOU. 

🧠 Context is almost always missing. And without context, even correct advice can be the wrong advice for you.

What Email Literacy Actually Means

Email literacy isn't about knowing every technical detail of DKIM or being able to recite inbox provider guidelines from memory. That develops over time and with experience.

🧠 The ability to hear a piece of advice and ask: “Does this apply to me, and how would I know?” That’s where email literacy comes in.

• Understanding that "open rates are unreliable" doesn't mean you stop tracking them. It means you understand “why” they're unreliable, and you weigh them accordingly.

• It's knowing that the "best time to send" is a question your own data should answer, not a Tuesday morning statistic from a report that averaged across industries you don't operate in.

• It's also recognising, when you read a confident take on LinkedIn or Twitter (yes, it will always be Twitter to me), whether the person writing it has the experience to back it up or is simply regurgitating something they read last week.

🚨 That last one is tougher. And it's where community comes in.

The Room You're In Shapes What You Know

I run a newsletter called Email Advice in Your Inbox, a community newsletter for email senders who are actually trying to win at email, not just send it. 

🚨 One of the things I've noticed over the years of building that community is that the people who grow fastest as email practitioners aren't necessarily the ones reading the most content:

• They're the ones in the best conversations (and I include myself in that).

💡 When you're around people who genuinely know what they're doing, there’s a lightbulb that suddenly switches on:

• You start to hear things said differently.

• You notice when someone glosses over nuance that matters.

• You start asking better questions because you've heard better questions being asked.

🧠 Things just start to click.

Being in the right room calibrates that instinct of what “is” right (not just what feels right), and knowledge is a byproduct.

• You get faster at spotting the advice that doesn't necessarily apply to your context.

• You get better at recognising the "it depends" moments before you've made an expensive mistake (and it’s never a perfect science, but the best version is always the goal here).

• And crucially, you get comfortable saying "I'm not sure. Let me check with someone who's actually dealt with this" rather than defaulting to the first Google result or the most confident AI output. And that’s okay! We can’t all know everything (we never will).

✅ That's the real value of community in this space.

A Few People Worth Being In The Room With

If you're looking to sharpen your email literacy and surround yourself with people who actually know what they're doing, this is by no means a comprehensive list (and sorry to any friends I’ve left out here, but that’s an email’s worth of names alone).

🧠 Here are a few worth following and engaging with:

• Lauren Meyer: Besides Lauren’s deliverability experience and prowess, she’s also a phenomenal all-around email and email community ambassador, and someone who genuinely cares about this space.

• Dan Oshinsky: Dan was the head of newsletters at The New Yorker before moving into his consultancy, Inbo Collective. His knowledge, strategic thinking and understanding of the email space mean he’s a solid mind to follow.

• Jaina Mistry: Jaina has been in email, brand, and communications for ages and works at Knak, a leading email platform. Her knowledge of email, community approach and extensive experience are serious “follow” considerations.

• Dylan Redekop & Chanell Basilio: Though both phenomenal email minds in their own right, I group Dylan and Chanell because of the work they do together across Growth in Reverse and Growth Currency, which are solid assets to the email space.

(Simon's newsletter is, obviously, a good starting point. You're already here, and that's a point in your favour 😉 because he’s definitely on this list.)

💡 Beyond individual follows, communities like Email Geeks on Slack are worth your time. The volume of learning, engagement, and the ability to hear from the right folks about the right stuff is a serious boon to anyone’s email learning.

A Question Worth Pondering

🚨 Here's what I'd encourage you to ponder as we close this off: when you last decided on your email programme, strategy, or even a tactic, where did that decision come from?

If that was a blog post, a tool recommendation, an AI output or even a gut feel based on something you half-remember reading six months ago, none of those is necessarily wrong. 

💡 But if you can't articulate “why” that advice applies to your context, that's something you need to note internally.

No expert will ever truly know everything about email, but we all need to:

• Ensure we know enough to assess what we're being told,

• Trust the right sources,

• And build a network of people who'll push back on us when our thinking goes sideways.

✅ That's what email literacy looks like in practice.

And the good news is, you’re not alone in this. True email literacy is something you build by being in the right rooms, reading the right things, connecting with the right people, and asking better questions.

You're clearly already trying to do that, {{first_name|friend}}.

Des 💌

Des Brown

Des Brown has worked in email for over a decade. He’s founded the global Email Advice in Your Inbox newsletter community, the CrossLetter.com platform, and runs his consultancy, Email Expert Africa, out of Cape Town, South Africa.

Before You Go, {{first_name|friend}} - Some Of My Thoughts

There is a lot in Des’s guest post that lines up with how I think about email.

🚨 Most email advice is not necessarily wrong. It is just often missing the context that tells you whether it is right for you.

That is the problem with many email “best practices”. A useful observation gradually gets repeated, simplified and stripped of all its original context until it becomes a rule that everyone is apparently expected to follow.

And, as Des points out, AI can make that problem worse.

It can produce a perfectly convincing strategy, sequence or answer without knowing enough about your audience, your sending history, your reputation, your goals or what has previously worked for you.

That does not make AI useless. Far from it.

💡 But you still need enough knowledge to question what it gives you rather than assuming a confident answer must be the correct one.

I also liked Des’s point about being in the “right rooms”.

🎉 The value of a good community is not simply having more people available to give you answers:

• It has people who will ask what you are trying to achieve, challenge the assumptions behind the question and occasionally tell you that the answer is, annoyingly, “it depends”.

• Or that they do not know.

So, the next time you encounter a definitive piece of email advice, do not just ask whether it sounds sensible.

🧠 Ask why it should apply to your audience, what context might be missing and how you would know whether it was actually helping.

You may still decide to follow it, but you will be doing so for a better reason.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• A Second Layer of Testing - Can AI help with Accessibility? (Mark Robbins)

• 😎 Amazing!!! -Test the Email Verification Protocol with an origin trial. (Google)

• Benchmark Posts - They aren’t real! (Travis Hazlewood)

• 🚨 Not Guaranteed to Work in Practice - Why DMARC's new "np" tag can fail with DNSSEC. (DMARCwise)

• The First Thing You See - Email Header Design Best Practices. (Knak)

• The Case For Thank-You Pages - And What To Include On Yours. (Dylan Redekop & Email Advice In Your Inbox)

• Infobip Buys SocketLabs - Neutrality and Data Segregation Remain Foundational Principles. (Emailexpert)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #246 of All About Email!

Last week, I had my first guest author of the summer! We took a look at deliverability as email therapy: uncovering the habits behind complaints, poor engagement, and filtering, and making the changes that rebuild trust.

This week is one of my favourite newsletters of the year, and it only comes out twice a year as we look back at your Top 10 issues over the last six months and what we can learn and apply.

Let’s go! 👇

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Your Top Ten Emails

⚡️ The last time we did this was back in Issue #221, six months ago.

💡 If you are new, {{first_name|friend}}, every six months, I look back at the "Top Ten" newsletters based on your engagement and that of the rest of my lovely readers.

Raw click counts get inflated by bots scanning links, and web traffic can be skewed by one lucky share, so this ranking weights the metrics that actually reflect a real reader, using the following criteria and weighting:

• Open Rate - 40%

• Verified Click-Through Rate - 40%

• Web Views - 10%

• Web Click Rate - 10%

🎉 So, let's look at your "Top Ten" from January to June 2026, ranked by weighted engagement across those metrics. 👇

1. Issue #223 - 🤓 Google allows Gmail address change, what does it mean for email marketing?

2. Issue #225 - It's BIMI time! 🎉

3. Issue #222 - 🚨 Gmail is entering the Gemini era

4. Issue #241 - Only 8 emails passed. Out of 376,000.

5. Issue #227 - Yahoo-oh no! 🤦‍♂️

6. Issue #226 - Avoiding the Template Trap

7. Issue #233 - Local Newsletters 🤔

8. Issue #231 - Have you ever heard of DKIM2?

9. Issue #228 - 🧪 Making Emails A Live Experiment

10. Issue #230 - 📧 Introducing Preflight QA for Email

Did one of your favourites make the list, {{first_name|friend}}?

What can You Learn from this?

🧠 A few patterns jump out when you look back at ten issues side by side and analyse their analytics. And there might be some points and insights that can help you with your own content:

Platform News Wins!

🎉 Gmail's address change, Gemini, BIMI, Yahoo's inbox mess, four of your top five spots.

🚨 When something changes in an inbox you don't control, urgency does the heavy lifting for you. You don't need a clever angle. You need to be fast and clear (and that’s not always easy).

Specific Beats Clever, Every Time?

💡 "Only 8 emails passed. Out of 376,000." was your best open rate of the whole half. Not a pun, not a tease, just a genuinely alarming number.

The same story with "Have you ever heard of DKIM2?" A real question with a real answer waiting on the other side…curiosity intrigues.

The Unglamorous, Practical Content has Longevity

Template workflows, testing culture, and a new QA tool were never going to go viral.

💡 But readers keep finding and clicking them on the web long after send day.

Opens and Web Clicks Aren't Telling You the Same Story

🚨 Issues #231 and #233 climbed this list on the strength of what happened after the open, not because of a spectacular open rate.

🧠 Sometimes the subject line undersells what's actually inside.

So, what am I taking into the next six months?

💡 These are my insights, based on your interactions, {{first_name|friend}}, but I think you’ll find something useful in here too:

• If a platform changes something, say so fast. Don't wait for the perfect angle.

• Numbers or stats in subject lines work really well.

• Keep writing the "boring" practical stuff. It's doing more long-term work than it gets credit for.

• Stop reading open rate on its own. Verified clicks tell me if the thing inside actually worked.

• Give evergreen issues titles that'll still make sense to someone finding them on Google in a year, not just to me on send day.

The Best and a Dishonourable Mention?

Number One…The Winner

🏆 Issue #223 arguably did everything right when analysing the data, which is why it came out on top:

• People opened it,

• Clicked it,

• and kept coming back to it online. 🎉

Whoops…

🤦‍♂️ Issue #237: "Don't Do Stupid Things on a Friday" didn't make the ranked Top Ten, but it pulled in roughly 4x the web traffic of any other issue this half.

Its web click-through rate, though, was the lowest of the period. Great story, wide reach, but people came for the honesty, not to click anything, and believe me, there was a lot to click; that was the point of the issue.

💡 Reach and engagement aren't the same thing, and this issue is the proof.

Before You Go

Next week is our second guest author in our summer series, but can you guess who? Reply and let me know.

Here are some clues:

• This time it’s a male.

• He runs three newsletters.

• I’ve lost count of the side hustles.

• He’s a Stripo Ambassador.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🤭 Brilliant! - What's the email equivalent of buying a treadmill that becomes a clothes rack? (Lauren Meyer)

• 🤯 We Got This Wrong - HubSpot Spent 20 Years Selling Trust. It Took Four Days of Fine Print to Put It on the Line. (State of Brand)

• The Spam Trap Hydra - The Deliverab-Iliad, Chapter Two. (Alison Gootee)

• June 2026 - Creative of the Month. (Action Rocket)

• 🤦‍♂️ Oh Dear… - Apple Hide My Email Flaw Exposes Real Addresses. Apple Has Known for a Year. (Emailexpert)

• 5 Best Email Signature Generators- For campaigns, lead generation, compliance, etc. (Emailtooltester)

• What should you be doing? - Getting AI to the right temperature. (Megan Boshuyzen)

• Email Security and Gaps - The state of email authentication adoption in 2026. (Valimail)

• 🎉 A Favourite Newsletter Returns!! - Deliverability Defined is back! (Alyssa Dulin)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #245 of All About Email!

Last week, we went back in much more detail to something I mentioned almost in passing in Issue #237, one of about fifteen reasons I listed for why subscribers don't click. I gave it two sentences and moved on.

This week, I have my first guest author of the summer! We will take a look at deliverability as email therapy: uncover the habits behind complaints, poor engagement and filtering, and make the changes that rebuild trust.

Let’s go! 👇

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The Summer Series Begins

🏝️ It’s the beginning of the annual summer series, bigger than ever before, and I’m beyond excited to introduce my first guest.

Alison will tell you a little bit more about herself later, but if Alison speaks, I listen. I’ve been waiting for this moment for two years, so without further ado, I take it away, Alison Gootee. 👇

Deliverability Consulting Is Just Email Therapy

A while back, I wrote a LinkedIn post about how Spamhaus listings mirror the stages of grief. Denial ("This must be a mistake"). Anger ("Get us off this list NOW!"). Bargaining ("What if we just sunset unengaged contacts but don't implement confirmed opt-in?"). Eventually, acceptance. Once you see the resemblance, you can't unsee it.

But here's what I've realised after over a decade of doing this work: it doesn't just happen with blocklisting. It's basically the same story every time, which has led me to a somewhat uncomfortable conclusion:

🧠 Deliverability consulting is just email therapy.

Most of the time, senders already know exactly what's wrong; they just don't like the answer.

💡 The devil is always in the (omitted) details. Deliverability conversations rarely start with outright lies. They start with half-truths, and the interesting part is rarely what people tell me, but what they leave out.

Exhibit A: Double Opt-In

🚨 When a sender tells me double opt-in is too risky because they'll lose subscribers, my question is always the same: if those people genuinely wanted your email, why wouldn't they confirm?

(Nobody has ever enjoyed that question!)

Exhibit B: “Our Transactional Emails Are Incredibly Valuable”

🤷‍♀️ Okay! Then why are they generating spam complaints? Why are they going to addresses at yhaoo[dot]com? Do those seem like the behaviours of people who are excited to hear from you?

💡 If a message is truly expected, relevant, and wanted, complaints should be extremely rare. Addresses should be pristine. When they're not, the relationship deserves a closer look.

Exhibit C: "Our Emails Are Extremely Well-Targeted”

Great! Then could you explain why, if your targeting is so precise, people reported you as spam?

💡 The segmentation might be "sophisticated" (because it has to be, to obscure bad behaviours). The audience could technically be "highly engaged" (with someone else, somewhere else). The content strategy "mature" (spamming is as old as email).

When I see a campaign going to thousands of disposable Tempmail addresses, I start feeling less like a consultant and more like a therapist asking gently probing follow-up questions:

• "Tell me more about this audience."

• "How long have these people been subscribed?"

• "When was the last time they engaged?"

• "And how does that make you feel?"

🧠 Nobody schedules an urgent call because inbox placement is fantastic and revenue is climbing; they call in an expert when something hurts. And when something hurts, people do what people have always done: we look for a solution that doesn't require changing our behaviour.

Maybe there's a secret setting. Or a new IP to rotate in. Maybe Gmail is wrong. Maybe Spamhaus is wrong. Maybe everybody is wrong except us. Maybe they're in cahoots with our biggest competitor!

🤭 (Okay, and maybe you're just a little delusional right now, babe.)

💡 The questions change, but the underlying request is often the same: Can I keep doing the thing that's causing the problem, but with your approval?

Sometimes the answer is a conditional “yes”. Yes, you can keep sending to your engaged users if they actually signed up for what you're sending, and you can prove it.

❎ But often the answer is “no, you need to make some changes”, and that's where the real work begins.

Here's a secret I've never told a client directly

I rarely discover the root cause of a deliverability problem on my own. Most senders tell me what it is within the first fifteen minutes, and my job is to help them accept that it’s the problem.

💡 The most successful senders I've worked with aren't the ones who never have problems; they're the ones who are willing to be brutally honest about them.

• They investigate complaints rather than try to justify them.

• They actively send re-engagement attempts rather than insist inactive subscribers are secretly into them despite all evidence to the contrary.

• They don't spend six months hunting for a loophole; they build resilience and adapt.

🚨 The inbox is refreshingly, if brutally, honest. It tells you the things your subscribers aren't saying out loud. If you're not listening to complaints, poor engagement, and filtering decisions, eventually you'll hear it more directly, in a very awkward but productive meeting with somebody like me.

You can always stop coming to sessions; nobody's forcing you to listen. But if you plan to keep seeking second opinions until somebody tells you to continue doing exactly what you're doing, I have some unfortunate news about both therapy and deliverability.

🤔 So, how does that make you feel?

Not ready to book a session? I post free deliverability advice on LinkedIn every week. No copay.

Alison Gootee

Alison Gootee writes about email deliverability, authentication, reputation, and other topics people usually avoid at parties. She's spent 12+ years helping senders get into inboxes and out of their own way. Based in Vancouver, WA (not B.C or D.C.), Alison can most often be found chauffeuring her three dogs to their pup cup appointments (when she's not busy scrolling & trolling LinkedIn).

Before You Go

🎉 A huge thank you to Alison for kicking off this summer’s series. As always, during my time on her couch, I laughed while taking away some excellent advice with a healthy dose of honesty.

💡 If you felt this week’s advice was aimed a bit more towards enterprise, think again, the psychology is the same even if you have a smaller list.

A few things I want to pull out from this one. 👇

• The line that stuck with me most: "The segmentation might be sophisticated… because it has to be, to obscure bad behaviours." It got me thinking that complexity in your data model isn't inherently a sign of maturity. Sometimes it's a sign that someone's been very busy not fixing the actual problem. 🤔

• The other thing I'd add, and this connects to what I was writing about last issue (#244), is that the inbox being "refreshingly, if brutally honest" is still true, but the signals it sends back are getting harder to read.
  
  AI summaries, open rate noise, click tracking that's increasingly unreliable, the inbox hasn't stopped being honest, but the feedback loop between it and us is getting murkier.

• Which makes the behaviours Alison describes in her final bullet points, Investigating complaints rather than justifying them, Running re-engagement rather than pretending inactives are lurking fans, even more important.
  
  🚨 When the signals are harder to trust, your instinct to do the right thing has to do more of the work.

💡 And yes, if you've ever sat in a meeting (or a Zoom meeting, or an email thread) quietly knowing the answer but hoping someone would tell you it wasn't, this piece is about you…

It's about all of us, at some point.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

A free newsletter with the marketing ideas you need

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

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Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🔮 The Open Rate Oracle - The Deliverab-Iliad, Chapter One. (Alison Gootee)

• Best Practices - What You Can Learn from Some of the Most Successful Food Newsletters. (Inbox Collective)

• 🎉 Introducing Mr Email Dev - New YouTube channel where Mark Robbins talks all things email dev [I am very excited!]. (Mark Robbins)

• 75% Discount - Celebrating 10 years of ‘A Type of Email’. (Paul Airy)

• A Layer of Important Insights - 7 Best Email Tracker Chrome Extensions I’ve Tried. (EmailTooltester)

• Why the Inbox Still Matters - Marketing in a World Without Email. (Kickbox)

• 😎 Very Cool! - ZeroBounce Is Now Available in ChatGPT Apps. (ZeroBounce)

• The Impossible Job - Because responsibility without authority is one of the hardest jobs we can ask someone to do. (EmailBoutique)

• It’s About Impact - Secondhand Spam is secretly causing deliverability issues everywhere, and most marketers. (Travis Hazlewood)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #244 of All About Email!

Last week we looked at “zero-party” data. The one type of signal that passive tracking can't fake, AI can't intercept, and regulation can't take away. It felt like a natural conclusion to a run of issues that had hinted at the topic from several angles.

This week, I want to go back to something I mentioned almost in passing in Issue #237, one of about fifteen reasons I listed for why subscribers don't click. I gave it two sentences and moved on.

Let’s go! 👇

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AI Read Your Email First

In Issue #240, I covered Gmail's Gemini-era upgrades from Google I/O. But I want to come at this from a different angle today.

Because what's changed isn't just what Gmail “can do”. It's who reads your email first. 

And increasingly, that answer isn't your subscriber.

💡 Here's what’s basically happening across the two clients that matter most for most of us…

Apple Mail

🚨 Now generates an AI summary that replaces your preheader text. Not supplements it, replaces it.

Before your subscriber has opened the email, before they've even decided whether to open it, Apple Intelligence has read your email, generated a one-sentence description of it, and put it in the spot where your carefully crafted preheader used to live.

(iOS 18 and later, on compatible devices)

Gmail

• Works differently. Its summaries are post-open, a "Summarise this email" button that appears after someone has opened the message, or an automatic distillation of a long thread.

• The pre-open experience in Gmail is largely unchanged. The reading experience inside the email is what's increasingly mediated.

(via Gemini, rolled out progressively through 2026)

🧠 This distinction matters more than it might seem. Apple's intervention happens before the open. Gmail happens inside the email. They create different problems at different points in the journey.

A User Can Turn These Off, But Will They?

🤔 Users can turn AI Summaries off in both Apple Mail and Gmail (although turning Gmail’s feature off also turns off the AI feature in other Google software); however, I don’t think many will, especially when it comes to Google.

Turning off AI Summaries is relatively easy for both Apple and Gmail (for now), but as Apple Intelligence improves (they made a big deal of this at the latest WWDC26), will users turn it off, and will Google users really want to give up AI in other apps because they want to remove it from Gmail?

🤔 If/when AI becomes “on by default”, how will that change things?

What the AI Picks Up. And What It Doesn't

Oracle's Digital Experience Agency ran structured tests across both Apple Intelligence and Android AI using emails with varying content and coding approaches. A few findings:

Image text is invisible to both

• If your email is built primarily around graphical text, text baked into images rather than live HTML, the AI has almost nothing to work with.

• Apple Intelligence surfaces a "too short to summarise" message.

• Android AI fills the gap with footer content, an unsubscribe link boilerplate, and information about the sender. Neither is a useful introduction to your email.

HTML text higher in the message carries more weight for the pre-open summary

💡 The first paragraph or two gets prioritised in what gets surfaced before someone opens. The longer post-open summaries pull more broadly from the full email.

Tone doesn't survive summarisation

🤔 Testing of Apple Intelligence summarisation consistently found this:

• Humour gets stripped, sarcasm becomes a neutral statement, emotional warmth flattens into dry description.

• A funny email becomes "Newsletter about [topic]." An excited announcement becomes "Information about upcoming event."

🚨 That’s a big one for me, as tone is so important in communication and the original tone is completely removed.

The Engagement Picture (With an Important Caveat)

🧠 Several sources, including deliverability platform Folderly, which monitors email performance across large volumes of Gmail sends, have observed a pattern emerging since Gmail's AI features rolled out:

• Open rates appear to be ticking up,

• While click-through rates are declining.

🚨 I want to flag this carefully. This is proprietary data from one vendor's client set, not industry-wide research. "AI summaries caused this" is hard to prove, and there are plenty of other variables at play. I'd treat it as a potential directional signal.

But the mechanism it points to is worth understanding:

• Gmail may be triggering opens to generate summaries (inflating your open count).

• In contrast, readers who get a useful summary from Gemini feel satisfied without clicking further into your email.

💡 This connects directly to what we covered in Issue #242, opens becoming less reliable as a signal, for yet another related reason. The AI may be making your open rate look healthier than it is, while quietly affecting what happens next.

The Newsletter Tension Nobody's Really Talking About

Here's where the mainstream advice gets a bit thin for our purposes.

If you search "how to write emails for AI summaries," you'll find something like:

• Front-load your key message in the first 150-200 characters

• Use clear headings

• Make your CTA findable early; eliminate filler.

That advice is sensible if your email's primary goal is to get someone to click "Buy now" or "Book a call."

🤔 But what does it mean for a newsletter?

The value proposition of a newsletter isn't a single CTA. It's the experience of reading it.

❤️ It's the voice, the context, the framing, the aside that lands because you've been paying attention for twelve issues. The things that build a subscriber relationship over time aren't the things that distil cleanly into one AI sentence.

Worse, some of what makes a newsletter worth reading, the slow build, the contextual opening, the personality in the second paragraph, is exactly what the AI summary won't capture.

The algorithm isn't looking for your voice. It's looking for a factual summary of your content.

🫠 That creates a genuine tension: if you write “for” the AI summary, you risk making your newsletter feel like a briefing document. If you “write for” the reader experience, your AI summary might be a poor introduction to an email the subscriber would have loved.

💡 The “partial” good news: subscribers who already trust you open first and read second.

The AI summary problem is most acute for new subscribers or people on the fence about opening. For an established newsletter with a loyal readership, this is a top-of-funnel issue more than a mid-list crisis.

🚨 But it's worth thinking about. Your welcome sequence is now even more important than it used to be; the first impression you make needs to earn the relationship before a reader decides how much attention to give your preheader replacement.

What You Can Actually Do

I'm not going to suggest you strip personality from your writing. I'm not going to do that to mine.

✅ But some practical adjustments:

1) Treat your preheader like it no longer exists (for part of your audience)

For Apple Mail users on compatible devices, your preheader has been replaced.

You don't need to delete it. It still works for other clients, but stop relying on it to carry weight for the growing share of your list reading on Apple Intelligence-enabled devices.

💡 The work your preheader used to do needs to be done somewhere else, earlier in your email.

2) Don't bury your opening

🚨 Your first sentence or two matters more than it used to, not because the AI demands it, but because it always did.

You don't have to front-load a CTA. You do need to lead with something that earns the reader's attention for the rest of the email.

💡 A good opening line that signals what the issue is genuinely about will generate a better AI summary and be better for your reader. Those two things aren't in conflict here.

3) Use live HTML text for anything important

If your email contains a key date, a deadline, or a main message, it needs to be in live text, not baked into an image.

The AI won't read image text. Neither will screen readers.

This is an accessibility practice that also turns out to be an AI practice. (As covered in Issue #241, accessibility and technical best practice tend to point in the same direction.) 😎

4) Summarise your own email before you send it

If you have an Apple device that supports Apple Intelligence, open a test send and tap "Summarise." Read what it says. Is it accurate? Does it represent the value of what's inside?

💡 If the summary is disappointing, that's genuinely useful feedback, not necessarily to change your email for the AI, but to ask whether your opening is doing enough.

What You Can't Control

🧠 These are platform-level changes, enabled by default, that you cannot switch off on your subscribers' behalf. You can't suppress the AI summary. You can't write metadata that overrides it.

🤔 So what can you control?

Remember the Fundamentals

Some of the fundamentals that make an email worth reading:

• Relevance,

• Clarity,

• Genuine value.

💡 Are the same fundamentals that make it machine-readable? Writing a better email for a human tends to produce a better AI summary.

🚨 What's actually being asked of you isn't a new writing framework. It's the same thing that's always been asked: be clear about what you're sending and why it matters.

🙋‍♂️ I'm curious: Have you ever read an AI summary of your own email and been surprised by what it pulled out? Better or worse than you expected?

Reply and let me know.

Before You Go

🏝️ The summer series starts next week! 🎉

• Ten guest authors from some of the biggest names in email!

• Some returning, some new.

• Topics I genuinely didn't see coming when I started putting this together.

• It's the biggest series yet, and I'm already looking forward to reading it with you.

💡 If you missed last year’s series, don’t worry. I will sprinkle my thoughts and opinions throughout the guest issues, and I will still be writing some issues myself throughout the summer.

See you next week, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

A free newsletter read by 117,000 marketers

The best marketing ideas come from marketers who live it. That’s what The Marketing Millennials delivers: real insights, fresh takes, and no fluff. Written by Daniel Murray, a marketer who knows what works, this newsletter cuts through the noise so you can stop guessing and start winning. Subscribe and level up your marketing game.

Sign Up Free

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• Only One Should Survive - The Two Jobs of the Open Pixel. (Engagor)

• 💡 From the Horse’s Mouth - Top 10 Gmail sender issues. (Gmail)

• Consolidating with AI - How to evaluate an email creation platform's MCP server. (EmailShepherd)

• Important Apple Changes - New domain for Sign in with Apple and iCloud+ Hide My Email. (MV Braverman)

• Outlook Feedback Loop Is Transitioning to ARF - Recipient Address No Longer Available. (Postmastery)

• Deliverability Academy - The Impact of Email. (Mailgun)

• How to Stop Them - What are AI phishing attacks? (Valimail)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #243 of All About Email!

Last week, I picked up a thread that's been running through several recent issues and took a closer look at it. Because if opens are unreliable and clicks are increasingly complicated, the question is: “What do you actually measure?”

This week,  I want to take that one step further. Because if the passive data we've been collecting is increasingly unreliable, what's the alternative? There's one type of data that none of those problems touches. And I’m guessing most of us aren't using it anywhere near as much as we could.

Let’s go! 👇

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The Data You Can Actually Trust in 2026

🧠 Back in Issue #239, while wrapping up the CNIL and Garante tracking pixel series, I wrote:

That line was really about zero-party data, even if I didn't say so directly. And after last week's deep dive into why passive tracking is so difficult to rely on right now, it feels like the right moment to dig into it properly.

💡 I've touched on this topic before, but the context has shifted enough that it deserves a fresh look.

What Is Zero-Party Data, and Why Does It Matter Now?

There's a data trust hierarchy worth understanding:

• Third-party data: Collected by external trackers, often without the subscriber's knowledge. Heavily regulated, increasingly blocked, and dying fast.

• Second-party data: Purchased or shared from another brand's first-party data. Requires trusting the source. **

• First-party data: Passively collected from your own interactions. Clicks, opens, purchase history. The subscriber didn't actively give it to you; you inferred it from their behaviour.

• Zero-party data: Intentionally and explicitly provided by the subscriber. They typed it, answered it, selected it. They know you have it. They gave it on purpose.

(** 🤮 🤮 (Please don’t buy and sell people’s data) )

💡 That last distinction matters more than it might seem. First-party data, your opens and clicks, is exactly what's been degraded. We covered why last week in detail: Apple MPP pre-loading pixels, security bots inflating click data, and AI intermediaries acting on emails before a human reads them.

🚨 Zero-party data is completely immune to all of that. A subscriber who tells you what topics they care about, how often they want to hear from you, or what their biggest challenge is has given you something no tracking pixel can fake, no security bot can trigger, and no AI can intercept (well, maybe not the last one 🤭 🫠).

The Convergence That Makes This the Right Moment

💡 Several forces are pointing in the same direction simultaneously:

• Passive signals are less reliable than they've ever been. As we covered last week, opens are inflated, clicks are unreliable, and AI is increasingly sitting between your email and your reader. If you need data you can actually act on, you increasingly have to ask for it directly.

• Privacy regulation is tightening. The CNIL and Garante rulings on tracking pixels, covered in Issues #238 and #239, make things very clear. Tracking-based data collection is under genuine regulatory pressure, and the rules are only moving in one direction.

• Personalisation is increasingly expected. Subscribers have been conditioned by years of personalised experiences to expect relevance. But you can't personalise well without actually knowing something about the person. And the inferred data you've been using is becoming less accurate.

🧠 The result is a gap: brands that have spent years collecting passive behavioural data are finding it increasingly unreliable, while the simplest solution, “just asking”, has been available the whole time.

What Zero-Party Data Actually Looks Like in Practice

Let’s get specific, with some examples (this isn’t an exhaustive list):

Your Welcome Sequence

Your welcome sequence is the highest-engagement window in your entire email programme. Most senders use that window to introduce themselves to subscribers.

💡 A better question: what if you used it to ask about the subscriber?

A single question in email two or three, "What's the biggest email marketing challenge you're dealing with right now?" or "What brought you here?", takes seconds to answer and gives you context you can actually use.

That reply tells you more about what that subscriber needs than a hundred phantom opens ever will.

🎉 If enough people give similar answers, you've just had your next several issues handed to you.

Your Preference Centre (That Isn't Just About Frequency)

Most preference centres ask one question: "How often do you want to hear from us?" That's useful, but it's the floor, not the ceiling.

💡 A preference centre that also asks about content interests gives you something genuinely valuable.

🚨 Those answers segment your list in ways no click pattern can replicate. And subscribers who've actively chosen their preferences are less likely to disengage because they're receiving what they asked for.

Polls Directly in Your Emails

😎 Beehiiv has a native poll feature, and it's one of the most underused tools in the arsenals of most newsletter operators.

A single-question poll embedded in an issue takes seconds to answer and gives you immediate directional data that no bot can contaminate.

💡 It doesn't need to be heavy. "What's your biggest frustration with email platforms right now?" or a simple this-or-that between two topics you're considering covering.

The Reply Prompt You Might Already Be Using

✅ If you're ending issues with a "hit reply" invitation, you're already doing this; you just might not be thinking of it in these terms.

Every subscriber who replies is handing you something explicit, intentional, and unambiguously human.

💡 The question isn't whether to collect zero-party data. It's whether you're doing anything with it.

The Part Most Writing on This Topic Skips

🚨 Collecting zero-party data and then ignoring it is pointless, and yet it’s easily done.

It’s not quite as simple as this, but if you ask subscribers what topics matter most and your editorial calendar doesn't change, you've taken something from them without giving anything back.

The value exchange only works if there's an actual exchange.

🤔 For a newsletter, it could be argued** that the bar is lower than for a commercial brand. You arguably don't need a personalisation engine. You just need to let the answers shape what you write.

(** I would argue you should always try your best and aim for a high bar no matter what.)

💡 For example, if the replies to your "what do you want more of?" prompt cluster around one topic, that's your next issue. If your welcome sequence reveals that half your new subscribers are solo consultants, that's context you can bake into how you frame that topic.

🧠 And there's a deliverability benefit too. Replies are among the strongest positive signals that mailbox providers use to assess sender reputation. A list that replies improves your inbox placement over time — not because you asked them to, but because the conversation is real.

What Have I Learned From My Own Replies?

💡 The replies I get to "hit reply" prompts have shaped this newsletter more than any open rate or click report has.

They've told me:

• Which topics felt genuinely useful, and which topics are too technical?

• What topics would they like to see more of?

• What my readers struggle with.

• When my readers have more useful information to share on a topic.

• That the self-deprecating moments, the automation mess-up in Issue #237, get more responses than almost anything else.

None of that came from data in a dashboard. It came from people taking the time to type a few sentences and hit send.

🎉 That's zero-party data. And it's the most useful data I collect.

Three Things You Can Do This Week

💡 Start small. Ask one question. Listen to the answer. Let it change something.

1. Add one question to your welcome sequence. Not a survey, one question. Something genuinely useful to you, with a clear invitation to reply. See what comes back.

2. Review your preference centre. If it only asks about frequency, consider adding a content interest question. (If your ESP doesn’t have one or has paywalled it, consider building your own.)

3. Look back at your last three "hit reply" prompts. What did people actually say? If you haven't revisited those replies recently, start there. The answers might reshape what you write next.

🙋‍♂️ I'd love to know:

• Do you actively collect zero-party data from your subscribers?

• And if you do, what's the most useful thing a subscriber has ever told you?

Reply and let me know.

Before You Go

🏝️ I am very excited that the annual summer series will start in a couple of weeks.

If you are new to this newsletter, it’s my favourite time of the year as some very special guest authors join me as we discuss all things email marketing.

In the biggest series yet, I have ten guest authors (some returning and some new) who will be sharing their thoughts with me, covering a wide range of email marketing topics that have got me full of anticipation. 🎉

I can’t wait, {{first_name|friend}}!

That's it for this week. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 😬 Oh dear!.. - How badly are they going to manage your domain reputation? (Laura Atkins)

• Dear Email Industry - We've Got a GDPR Problem. (Jacques Corby-Tuech)

• 😎 Very Cool! - Email Deliverability Data, Native in Your AI Workflow. (Postmaster+)

• Deliverability Analysis - Gmail Will Now Tell You, in Plain Language, Whether Users Want Your Email. (Emailexpert)

• Knak Goes Omnichannel - Starting With SMS and RCS. (Knak)

• Doing More of What We Love - The human-centred approach to AI adoption (Sally Hutchinson & ActionRocket)

• The Responsibility of Reach - Cher Fuller at Unspam 2026. (Really Good Emails)

• EasyDMARC 2026 Report - Half a Million Domains Installed the Alarm and Never Switched It On. (Emailexpert)

• 🤯 Wow! - Email, Lifecycle & CRM Marketing Knowledge Base. (Jacques Corby-Tuech)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #242 of All About Email!

Last week was the Email Markup Consortium's 2026 Accessibility Report, with a 99.88% failure rate that the industry really can't keep ignoring (but probably will 😢).

This week, I want to pick up a thread that's been running through several recent issues and take a closer look at it. Because if opens are unreliable and clicks are increasingly complicated, the question is: “What do you actually measure?”

Let’s go! 👇

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Opens Are Unreliable. Clicks Are Complicated. So What Do You Actually Measure?

🧠 This isn't a new problem. But in 2026, though, we’re dealing with three distinct layers of decline occurring simultaneously, and together they have a real impact that warrants closer exploration.

Layer 1: Opens (broken since 2021)

If you've been reading this newsletter for a while, you know this one. Apple Mail Privacy Protection, which we covered in detail back in Issue #190, pre-loads tracking pixels before a human ever reads the email.

💡 A 2024 Validity study found open rates climbing 18–32% above verified engagement benchmarks for senders with Apple Mail-dominant audiences, and higher still for those where Apple Mail accounts for the majority of opens

Open rates still have directional value. But as a precise measure of who actually read your email? They haven't been that for over four years.

Layer 2: Clicks (getting messier)

💡 In Issue #237, I spent a whole issue unpacking why real, engaged subscribers sometimes never click anything. But there's an inverse problem worth highlighting too.

Security gateways, antivirus software, and corporate IT systems routinely pre-scan every URL in an email by firing the tracking redirect before any human interaction.

That inflates your click data with bot-generated signals, making engagement look better than it actually is.

🚨 And as I discovered the hard way with my re-engagement automation, some of your most loyal readers may never click a thing, while some of your click "data" never involved a human at all.

High click numbers and low click numbers are both harder to interpret than they used to be. 🫠

Layer 3: AI Intermediaries (2025–2026)

🤔 This is the newest layer, and the one I think deserves the most attention right now.

As we covered in Issue #240, Gmail's AI Inbox, Apple Intelligence, and Gemini Daily Brief are now summarising, triaging, and in some cases acting on emails before a human consciously reads them. Gmail can mark an email as "done" without the subscriber opening it at all.

🚨 An email intercepted, summarised, and actioned by AI doesn't register as an open or a click. But it was received. It was read. It may have prompted a response. And none of that appears in your dashboard.

The Real Problem Isn't the Metrics. It's What We Built on Top of Them.

🧠 Here's the thing: opens and clicks were never perfect. We used them because they were accessible, automated, and good enough for most purposes.

The problem is that we built a lot on top of them: 

• Re-engagement automations triggered by click inactivity (speaking from experience 🫠).

• Sunset logic that removes subscribers who haven't "opened" in 90 days.

• A/B testing against open rates that may be 40% phantom.

• Segmentation driven by engagement data, including bot traffic.

💡 This isn't about abandoning metrics entirely.

It's about understanding what each number can and can't tell you, and shifting from passive tracking to active signals.

🚨 That's the real distinction worth making:

• Passive tracking logs events automatically, without the subscriber doing anything intentional, such as opens, clicks, and often page visits.

• Active signals require the subscriber to take an action. And in 2026, active signals are the ones that still mean something.

What Still Actually Tells You Something?

Reply Rate

✅ The hardest signal to fake, and one of the most underused metrics in email marketing.

A reply requires deliberate human action. No bot fires one, no AI pre-loads one, no privacy tool blocks it. A reply is unambiguously real (…at least for now, who knows what will be automated with AI in the future 🤷‍♂️).

For that reason alone, it's worth tracking even if your platform doesn't surface it prominently.

Revenue Per Send / Revenue Per Subscriber

💡 For anyone selling anything through email, products, services, consultancy, or sponsorships, this is the number that connects your email programme to the actual business.

Not a vanity metric. A smaller, more engaged list with high revenue per subscriber beats a large list with impressive open rates every single time.

🤔 If you're a newsletter publisher, this might be sponsorship revenue attributed per send. If you're selling a product, it's tracked via email conversions. The mechanism varies, the principle doesn't.

The “Disaffection Index”

🚨 This framing has been gaining traction in the industry, and I think it's a useful one. 

Rather than chasing positive signals that might be partially false, look at the negative ones, which are considerably harder to inflate.

🧠 The concept was first coined by Melinda Krueger in 2005 as a smarter way to look at unsubscribe rate. In its original form, it's a ratio: unsubscribes divided by unique clicks, which tells you how many people clicked on your email solely to leave.

The 2026 interpretation, from a Validity report covered by MarTech, broadens that into a composite view:

• Combine unsubscribes, complaints, and hard bounces into a single metric that shows how quickly you're burning through your audience.

💡 What matters is tracking it consistently over time rather than in isolation. A single high-unsubscribe send might mean nothing. A composite that's been quietly climbing across multiple issues is telling you something real.

🧠 This matters because mailbox providers increasingly treat negative signals as stronger indicators than positive ones when assessing sender reputation. If your disaffection composite is flat or declining over time, your programme is likely healthy, regardless of what your open rate says.

🚨 One important caveat to note: unsubscribes are not entirely immune to automation.

Security scanners and antivirus tools are documented to pre-click links in emails, including unsubscribe links, which can generate false unsubscribe events, particularly for B2B audiences behind corporate security gateways.

Spam complaints made within the mailbox interface are a cleaner signal, since they require deliberate action in the email client rather than clicking a URL.

If your unsubscribe rate spikes suddenly across a single send to a B2B segment, it's worth ruling out bot activity before drawing conclusions.

💡 B2B is not really my wheelhouse, so if I’ve made any mistakes here, let me know, {{first_name|friend}}.

Net List Growth Rate

🧠 Gross new subscribers minus churn, tracked over time.

A list that's growing after accounting for people leaving tells you something meaningful about the health of your email programme overall.

A shrinking list, despite strong "open rates", is trying to tell you something your dashboard might be hiding.

CTOR (Click-to-Open Rate)

💡 Neither the click number nor the open number is clean in isolation. But the ratio between them can be really helpful.

If someone both opened and clicked, at least one of those events is more likely to have involved a human.

CTOR isn't a perfect signal, but it's better than raw click rate alone, and it's a useful way to evaluate content effectiveness within a campaign without being thrown off by inflated open rates.

Survey and Preference Responses

✅ A subscriber who answers a question has given you something explicit, intentional, and the zero-party data we need.

The "hit reply" prompt at the end of every issue is a version of this. It's also, as it turns out, one of the most useful things I do in this newsletter, {{first_name|friend}}.

🎉 One of my RSS subscribers sent me two lovely replies to last week’s newsletter, and I’ve included one of his links in this week’s “News & Tips” section.

What This Means in Practice

🚨 I want to be clear about something. None of this means opens and clicks are worthless, or that you should rip your reporting apart tomorrow.

It means using them for what they're actually good for, not for what we've been pretending they are.

Opens are still useful for:

• Directional trends over time (even if the absolute number is inflated, a sharp drop is meaningful).

• A/B subject line testing, as a relative signal within a single send to the same audience.

• Identifying complete non-responders for list hygiene purposes, used cautiously.

Clicks are still useful for:

• Understanding which content generates deliberate interest.

• Identifying the small percentage of subscribers who are consistently active.

• Campaign-level relative comparisons.

🤔 What they're not useful for: precise conclusions about individual subscriber behaviour, automated decisions about who to suppress, or reporting that implies a level of certainty the data doesn't support.

Three Things Worth Doing This Week

🚨 The aim is not to create a flawless metric. Instead, we want a more accurate view that comes from considering several signals, rather than relying on a single, convenient number.

1. Add reply rate to your regular reporting view.
   Most platforms don't surface this natively; you'll need to track it manually: total replies to a send divided by total delivered. It's a simple calculation, and worth doing."
   
   💡 Even a rough number could be very helpful.
   

2. Review your re-engagement or sunset logic.
   If it's based purely on opens or clicks, you may be removing engaged subscribers who are simply privacy-conscious or reading via AI summaries.
   
   💡 Consider layering in revenue signals, reply history, or a longer window before suppression fires.
   

3. Run your last five issues through a simple question:
   "What would I conclude about this issue's performance if I removed the open rate entirely?" If the answer changes significantly, you've found a dependency worth fixing.

That's it for this week.

As always, {{first_name|friend}}, let me know your thoughts. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• ** Accessibility - Why Should I Set My Table Role As ‘Presentation’? (Email on Acid)

• So Good! - The Ultimate SPF / DKIM / DMARC Best Practices 2026. (Freddie Leeman)

• Email accessibility in production - Why it still breaks in 2026 and what teams can do about it. (Stripo)

• 😃 This was fun! - What kind of email sender are you? (Email Advice in Your Inbox)

• I Attended - My five favourite conversations from Inbox Expo 2026. (Claire Medcalf & Action Rocket)

• Unfair Advantage - How Will Newsletters Thrive in the Age of the AI-Powered Inbox? (Inbox Collective)

• 🚨 Worth Following! - Industry veterans propose a standard to start telling you where your mail actually lands. (Emailexpert)

• Followers to Subscribers - How to Grow Your Email List with Instagram. (EmailTooltester)

** 🎩 Hat tip to James, one of my subscribers via RSS, for suggesting this one.

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #241 of All About Email!

Last week was about Google I/O 2026, and Gmail got a significant AI upgrade across the board. If you're an email marketer, you need to know what's coming.

This week, I want to properly dig into something I flagged in last week's news section. The Email Markup Consortium's 2026 Accessibility Report. Because a 99.88% failure rate needs more attention.

Let’s go! 👇

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The EMC Email Accessibility Report 2026 is Out Now!

🧠 The Email Markup Consortium published its 2026 Accessibility Report last month, and it's not a comfortable read (sadly, it never is😬).

They analysed 376,348 emails sent between May 2025 and May 2026 across industries, geographies, and senders. The results:

• 99.88% of emails tested contained accessibility issues rated "Serious" or "Critical".

• Only 8 emails (that's 0.002%) passed all automated checks.

• Those 8 emails came from just three brands.

💡 Even those 8 that passed automated testing were later found to have issues on manual inspection. Alt text that didn't match the image content. Text is too small to read on narrow viewports. A near-perfect score on paper, but not perfect in reality.

🚨 The industry basically hasn't moved in years. In 2022, the failure rate was 99.9%.

Why Should This Matter to You?

🤔 I know what you might be thinking. "I'm not a developer. My ESP handles the HTML. This isn't my problem."

But this is not just a developer issue, in my opinion.

💡 Accessibility isn't just a technical compliance checkbox. It directly affects how many people can actually read and use your emails:

• People using screen readers (due to visual impairment) rely on proper markup to navigate your content.

• People with low vision need sufficient colour contrast to read your text.

• People with cognitive disabilities rely on clear structure and descriptive links to make sense of what you're asking them to do.

🧠 And even setting disability aside entirely, many of the things that make an email accessible also make it better for everyone:

• Clear link text.

• Real text instead of image-only content.

• Logical heading structure.

✅ These are only a few examples, and they're good email practice!

The Top Issues, And What They Actually Mean

Here are the most common failures from this year's report. 👇

1) 97% of emails are missing a language direction attribute

If a subscriber has their email client set to a right-to-left language (Arabic, Hebrew, etc.) and opens your email without a direction set, the layout can break completely. Not rendering oddly, it can just break.

💡 It's a one-attribute fix on the part of the platform or developer. The fact that it's sitting at 97% is a tooling problem, not a knowledge problem (more on this later).

2) 84% of layout tables have no accessibility role

🤔 Many email templates still use HTML tables to lay out visual content, columns, buttons, and image grids.

That's fine, but without telling assistive technology that those tables are just for layout (not actual data tables), a screen reader will try to interpret every cell as data.

It announces column headers that don't exist. It reads the structure, not the content.

Fixable at the template level. But most builders aren't doing it by default.

3) 71% of emails have links with no descriptive text

💡 This one's on us as senders, not just platforms.

"Click here." "Read more." "Learn more." These are the culprits. For someone navigating by keyboard or using a screen reader to skim links, these phrases tell them nothing about where the link goes.

🚨 The fix is simple: write the destination or action into the link. "Read the full case study." "Download the 2026 guide." "View your order status." More descriptive and better for everyone.

4) 58% of emails have insufficient colour contrast

🧠 More than half of the emails tested failed the colour contrast standard. The requirement is a 4.5:1 ratio between text and background colour.

💡 If your brand palette uses light grey text on white, or pale tones over coloured backgrounds, it's worth checking. Tools like Coolors and the WebAIM Contrast Checker will give you a pass/fail in seconds (Colour Contrast Checker is my personal favourite).

5) 48% of images are missing alt text

🚨 This is the “Critical” rated one, the highest severity. Nearly half of all emails tested contained images without alt attributes.

💡 Not blank alt text (which is fine for decorative images). No attribute. That means a screen reader announces "image" and nothing else. For linked images especially, this also rolls up into the "links with no text" problem: a linked image with no alt text is an invisible, unlabelled button.

What the Report Says About Beehiiv

🤔 This year, the EMC audited newsletter platforms directly for the first time, and since you're reading this on Beehiiv, I thought it was worth calling out specifically.

They audited 2,189 Beehiiv emails (from the last six months of the dataset). 100% failed automated testing.

💡 Here's the breakdown:

• 100% were missing the dir attribute (language direction — see #1 above).

• 99.59% had non-descriptive link text (the "click here" problem).

• 92.55% had links with no text at all, most likely linked images without alt text.

On a positive note, almost all Beehiiv emails passed the lang check, only 0.37% failed language attribution. That puts Beehiiv noticeably ahead of Substack and Shopify on that specific issue.

🚨 The EMC notes that these results don't automatically mean the platform is at fault; user choices matter too. But platforms do have a responsibility to guide users toward better defaults.

✅ A suggested fix for the specific call-out for Beehiiv: the dir attribute fix looks like it could be automated. The platform could infer the text direction from the already set language and apply it. That's a platform-level fix, not a sender-level one.

In the meantime, as Beehiiv users, we can control only the descriptive link text and alt text for every linked image.

💡 Mark Robbins from the EMC made a quick video explaining what the missing dir and lang attributes issues are and showing some examples of how people might experience them.

What About Email Clients?

🧠 The report goes beyond this year's sender behaviour and examines how well email clients support the HTML features required to build accessible emails.

They tested 37 accessibility-related HTML and CSS features across 43 email clients.

Not one client supports all 37.

💡 The top performers (and despite the winner, I still hate Apple Mail 🫠):

• Apple Mail (macOS): 34/37 ✅

• Apple Mail (iOS): 31/37

• Samsung Email: 31/37

• Proton Mail: 29/37

🚨 The big names most of your subscribers are probably using:

• Gmail (desktop): 17/37

• Gmail (iOS/Android): 15/37

• Outlook (Windows): 11/37

• Yahoo Mail (desktop): 16/37

🤔 Gmail in particular gets called out in the report. It still doesn't support @media (prefers-color-scheme). The feature that lets email senders properly implement dark mode. Instead, Gmail enforces its own dark mode, which frequently creates colour-contrast issues that it then blames on senders.

The EMC notes that Google appears on the 2026 Forbes Accessibility 200 list for its broader accessibility efforts. The contrast in feature support with Gmail's is, to put it mildly, notable.

💡 Outlook on Windows (the legacy app with the famous rendering engine) scored just 11/37. But Microsoft is deprecating that old rendering engine and moving toward a more unified approach.

Several other Outlook surfaces are already scoring in the low-to-mid 20s… progress. 🐌

Three Things You Can Do Right Now

🚨 Not all of this is in your control. If your email client strips semantic HTML, or your ESP generates inaccessible table layouts by default, those are upstream problems.

But here's what you can do:

1. Fix your link text. Search your templates and recent sends for "click here," "read more," and "learn more." Replace them with specific, descriptive text. This is 100% in your control, costs nothing, and improves the email for everyone.

2. Add alt text to every linked image. If you use a linked banner, button image, or logo at the top of your emails, add alt text that describes where the link goes, not just what the image shows.

3. Check your colour contrast. Grab your brand colours and run them through a contrast checker. If anything fails, flag it to your designer. Many contrast failures stem from well-intentioned "soft" colour palettes that don't hold up for people with low vision.

💡 And if you want to go further: Parcel.io, which the EMC used for testing, has a free accessibility checker. You can run your HTML through it on their Community plan.

Oh, And It's Also the Law (Sort Of)

💡One thing I haven't mentioned yet: the European Accessibility Act (EEA) took full effect on June 28, 2025. It requires EU businesses with more than 10 employees to make their digital products and services accessible to everyone, and it's widely understood to apply to digital marketing materials, including emails.

🚨 While email isn't explicitly named in the directive, the EAA primarily targets products and services, and its application to marketing channels is still being interpreted at the member state level (it’s a grey area).

But here's the important bit. Enforcement is already happening. The first EAA lawsuits in France were filed in November 2025. The Netherlands has audits planned for this year. And fines vary significantly by country, from €60,000 in Ireland up to around €900,000 in Sweden.

Private legal action in France and private warning letters in Germany are the earliest confirmed enforcement activities. In Germany specifically, e-commerce operators began receiving warning letters from law firms citing accessibility violations within weeks of the law taking effect, not from regulators, but from opportunistic law firms using competition law.

💡 That's a pattern familiar to anyone who remembers the early days of GDPR enforcement.

🧠 And if you're outside the EU, the EAA works similarly to GDPR. If you serve EU customers or users, you're expected to comply regardless of where your business is based.

The EMC report shows the industry hasn't meaningfully improved in years. The EAA means that for a large chunk of the industry, "we'll get to it eventually" is no longer a safe answer.

Before You Go

The EMC's conclusion is worth reflecting on: this is a systemic problem. The same basic failures have dominated the top 10 for four consecutive years.

🤔 But I don't think most email marketers are ignoring accessibility because they don't care. I think it's because the tools we use haven't made it easy, and the consequences aren’t felt.

💡 The consequences aren't actually that distant. There are an estimated 1.3 billion people globally living with some form of visual impairment. Accessibility failures don't just affect a small edge case; they affect a significant proportion of any real subscriber list.

The emails that get this right won't just be more inclusive. They'll be clearer, better structured, and more useful for everyone.

🙋‍♂️ I'd love to know: “Does your team think about email accessibility at all? Is it on the radar, or is it something that's never really come up?”

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}} (I read every one).

That's it for this week. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

What's hiding in your Google Ads account?

Most ecommerce brands that Echelonn audits have the same issues. Wasted spend hiding in campaign structure. Feed problems killing Shopping performance. Broken tracking leading to bad decisions. They’ve seen it all across 300+ accounts. Book a free audit and they’ll show you exactly where the gaps are.

Book your free audit

Sponsorship Opportunities

🚨 If you’re interested in sponsoring the “All About Email” newsletter, you can find all the details in this Google Doc.

Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• Spam or Inbox? - Top 10 Email Deliverability Tips. (Resend)

• Dark Mode Email Breakdown - Stop treating email dark mode like an afterthought. (Really Good Emails & Annett Forcier)

• 🤩 So Good! - 2026 Digital Marketing Lookbook. (Zeta Global)

• Shopping Around - BIMI Certificates and Domains. (Word to the Wise)

• Almost Uniquely American - Your US Email Compliance Assumptions Are Wrong Outside the US. (Mickey Chandler)

• 🧠 This just in - Your test emails are still emails. (Alison Gootee)

• Accessible Email Design - A Designer’s Accessibility Checklist. (Action Rocket)

• An Explanation? - Properly Authenticated Email Is Bouncing. (Emailexpert)

• What Did I Do? - Your ESP Can Block Your Account. (Send Point)

• DKIM2 Resource Hub - If you're developing DKIM2 software or testing DKIM2 deployment, you may find some of the tools or software there useful. (Steve Atkins)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #240 of All About Email!

Last week was Part Two of the CNIL/Garante tracking pixel mini-series… the hard part, where we got into what you actually need to do about it.

This week is about Google I/O 2026, which happened last Tuesday, and Gmail just got a significant AI upgrade across the board. If you're an email marketer, you need to know what's coming.

Let’s go! 👇

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What Google Just Announced for Gmail

🧠 Google I/O is Google's annual developer conference, and it's where they typically announce what's coming to all their major products.

This year, Gmail has been more prominent than it has been in a long time.

Here are some of my highlights. 👇

1) Gmail Live

This is the headline feature, and probably the most significant shift to how people interact with their inbox in years.

💡 Gmail Live lets subscribers speak to their inbox instead of typing keywords into a search box. You ask a natural language question out loud:

• "What's my flight's gate number?"

• "What's going on at my kid's school this week?"

✅ And Gmail pulls the answer directly from your emails. Gemini powers it, and it can:

• Handle follow-up questions without you having to start over.

• Jump between topics in the same conversation.

• Infer context, so if you say "the hotel booking", it knows which one you mean, even if the email doesn't say "hotel booking" in those exact words.

• Pull granular details like room numbers, flight gate codes, etc.

🚨 Important: Gmail Live is not replacing standard Gmail search. It's an additional option. Google has clearly learned from the Google Photos AI search debacle, where forcing an AI-only experience caused a massive user backlash, and is keeping the old search bar in place.

Availability: Rolling out this summer on Android and iOS to Google AI Pro and Ultra subscribers in the US (English only for now).

2) AI Inbox Expansion

AI Inbox has been around for a little while (we looked at it in detail in Issue 222). It turns your Gmail into a prioritised dashboard, surfacing tasks, to-dos, and important items on a single page using Gemini.

💡 Until now, it's only been available to Google AI Ultra subscribers (the most expensive tier). That's changing. Google is expanding AI Inbox to Google AI Plus and Pro subscribers, too.

So, a significantly larger number of your subscribers will have this experience.

💡 On top of the above, Gmail is gaining:

• Ready-to-send drafts: Gemini composes replies for you, matching your tone and past email style.

• Relevant file surfacing: Docs, Sheets, and Slides are surfaced alongside related email tasks.

• Task management: Mark to-dos as done directly inside your inbox, without leaving Gmail.

• Mark related emails as read: Once Gemini has surfaced the action, it can mark the email itself as done.

🚨 That last one is worth thinking about. Gmail isn't just organising your inbox anymore, it's deciding what counts as done. The email doesn't need to be opened. It just needs to be dealt with.

3) Daily Brief - Gmail Reads Your Inbox So You Don't Have To

💡 Daily Brief is a new morning digest feature inside the Gemini app. It sifts through your Gmail, Calendar, and Tasks, prioritises what matters, and presents it in a single, organised snapshot with suggested next steps.

🤔 Think of it as a personal assistant that reads every email you've received overnight and tells you what to pay attention to.

Availability: This one is already rolling out to Google AI Plus, Pro, and Ultra subscribers in the US.

4) Gemini Spark - Your Inbox Gets an Agent

🧠 Gemini Spark is Google's new agentic feature, meaning it doesn't just surface information; it can take actions on your behalf.

It integrates directly with Gmail, Docs, and other Workspace apps and will later this summer expand to third-party tools via MCP (Model Context Protocol).

💡 What does "agentic" mean in practice? Example: Gemini sees an email about a meeting request, drafts a reply, checks your calendar for conflicts, and then asks you to confirm before it sends anything.

🚨 Google is explicit about this; Spark will ask for confirmation before "high-stakes actions," such as sending emails or adding calendar events. It's not firing off replies on your behalf without a green light.

But it’s clear where things are heading, and the foundations for a much more autonomous inbox are already being laid.

Availability: Coming soon to Google AI Ultra subscribers in the US.

5) Universal Cart - Gmail Becomes a Shopping Hub

💡 This one's coming to Gmail a little later, but it's worth discussing now.

Universal Cart is a Gemini-powered shopping cart that works across the Gemini app, YouTube, and eventually Gmail. Add a product to your cart from anywhere across Google, and it will:

• Track price drops and deal alerts.

• Surface price history.

• Flag product incompatibilities (e.g. PC parts that don't work together).

• Use Google Wallet to factor in your payment method perks and loyalty info.

🚨 Gmail's role in this will be as a surface where purchase history, order confirmations, and deal alerts feed into the Universal Cart layer.

It's coming to Search and the Gemini app first this summer, with YouTube and Gmail to follow.

6) Gmail as Context for Google Search

💡 This one's easy to miss in the announcements because it's framed as a Search feature rather than a Gmail feature. But it’s important.

Google is expanding Personal Intelligence in AI Mode, giving users the option to connect Gmail (and Google Photos, with Calendar coming soon) so that their personal data feeds into Google Search results.

Not Public Search, but Personal Search. A user might ask Google something, and if they've connected Gmail, the answer can pull from their inbox.

🚨 This is another signal in the same direction: Gmail is becoming less of a standalone email app and more of a private data source for Google's broader AI ecosystem.

Email is becoming context, not just content.

What Does This Mean for Email Marketers?

🎉 So Google announced a lot of things. But what does any of this actually mean for us, and wherever you sit in the email marketing community?

If you thought opens were unreliable after Apple MPP, and clicks were getting harder to interpret because of bots, scanners, and security systems, the next layer is that AI may increasingly interpret your email before a human reads it.

I need more time to think and reflect, but here are some things I'm thinking about now. 👇

Gmail Live Rewards Findable Emails

When a subscriber uses Gmail Live to find information in their inbox, the AI pulls from the content of your emails, subject lines, body copy, and structured details.

💡 The AI is smart; it can infer context and pull granular details. But it can only work with what's actually there.:

• Emails that are clear, specific, and well-structured are going to surface better.

• Vague subject lines, buried details, and wall-to-wall images with minimal text will be harder for the AI to work with.

🤔 It's a bit like SEO, but for your inbox. Clear, content-rich emails will be easier to find via voice search. Emails need enough substance for the AI to find something worth surfacing.

AI Inbox and Daily Brief Are Now Curating Your Emails

🚨 This is the one that I think deserves the most attention.

With AI Inbox and Daily Brief now rolling out to a much wider subscriber base, a growing number of your readers are not going to open Gmail and scan their inbox the way we're used to imagining.

They're going to get a digest of what Gemini thinks matters.

💡 Which means: the AI is now an intermediary between your email and your subscriber. It decides whether your email makes the cut into the summary. It determines whether your call to action appears as a to-do.

🤔 We're still early in understanding how this prioritisation actually works, but the signals I'd watch are engagement history, reply behaviour, and whether emails encourage action.

The emails that have historically driven responses and clicks are probably the ones that get surfaced. The ones that don't, probably won't.

Agentic Inboxes Can Act on Your Email Without the Subscriber Doing Anything

Gemini Spark taking actions on behalf of users is an interesting, if not predictable, development.

💡 It means someone could potentially receive your email, Gemini reads it, drafts a reply, and sends it, all without the subscriber consciously deciding anything.

🤔 For transactional email, that could be fine. For relationship-building email? That's a different conversation entirely. A reply that looks like a personal response but is actually generated by AI is not human engagement?

Will it be Friday, or will Jarvis regularly reply on your half, {{first_name|friend}}?

Commercial Email Is About to Get Layered

🚨 Universal Cart is the one to watch from a commercial email perspective. Order confirmations, shipping updates, and deal alerts, all of that data flowing into an AI-powered shopping hub, changes the context in which those emails are experienced.

💡 Your promotional email isn't just a message anymore. It could be a data point in someone's AI-powered shopping workflow.

A Test You Can Run Right Now

🧠 Before I go, here's something practical. Take your next email, newsletter, campaign, whatever it is, and ask yourself these questions:

1. What's the one-sentence summary?

2. What's the main action you're asking for?

3. Is the key deadline or important detail in real text, or buried inside an image?

4. Does the message still make sense with the images removed?

5. Would someone understand the value from the first 100 words?

💡 If you answered "no" to any of those, tighten it before you send. Not because AI is replacing email. Because AI is increasingly sitting between the email and the reader.

Clarity has never been more important.

Before You Go

🤔 The overarching theme here is that Gmail is no longer just a place where email arrives. It's becoming an AI layer that sits on top of email:

• Curating,

• Summarising,

• Acting,

• and finding.

For email marketers, the channel isn't going away, far from it.

But the way subscribers experience it is shifting, and faster than most might acknowledge.

🙋‍♂️ I'd love to know: Does any of this change how you're thinking about your email programme?

Hit reply, {{first_name|friend}}, and let me know.

That's it for this week. 👋

All About Email - Playlist 🎧

Every week, as I write this newsletter, I'll share the track of the moment to create an unbelievably eclectic playlist just for your inbox.

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Email Marketing News & Tips

This week's excellent and insightful email news & tips:

• 🎉 Listen to Me 🤭 - Why Most WooCommerce Stores Under-Use Email - and What to Fix First. (Me & Do the Woo Podcast)

• Last Call - The 2026 Really Good Emails Survey. (Really Good Emails)

• ICO updates ahead - Why UK email senders should revisit soft opt-in and legitimate interest rules. (Emailexpert)

• 🤯 99.88% Failure Rate! - Accessibility Report 2026. Only 8 emails (0.002%) passed all accessibility checks. (Email Markup Consortium)

• Quality, No Scale - Five Things I Learned at The Newsletter Conference This Year. (Inbox Collective)

• Useful AI - Using AI to assist accessibility. (Paul Airy)

• 🧠 This is a lot! - What Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and Apple are doing to your email. (Jacques Corby-Tuech)

• Paradigm Shift – Think Differently About Disability. (Sarah Gallardo)

• It’s Here!! - The new DMARC is here. (Word to the Wise)

• Deliverability Score - Deliverability risk is revenue risk. Now you can see both. (SendGauge)

• A Sad Day - Intuit Cuts 17% of Workforce as Mailchimp Revenue Declines. (Emailexpert)

If you have any questions about this email or email marketing, please reply, and I will get back to you as soon as possible.

I hope you have a great week! 👋