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?

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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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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:

• 🎉 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! 👋

Hi, {{first_name|friend}}. 👋

Welcome to Issue #239 of All About Email!

Last week was Part One of our mini-series about two European regulators that may have closed a very important grey area in email marketing.

This week is Part Two, where we discuss possible solutions and important data considerations in light of the changes coming to open tracking.

Let’s go! 👇

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Quick Recap: If You Missed Last Week

🧠 If you missed Part One in Issue #238, I encourage you to read it, but here’s the short version:

• France's CNIL and Italy's Garante both published tracking pixel rules within three days of each other in April 2026.

• Individual open tracking for marketing, personalisation, analytics, or fraud analysis now requires explicit consent.

• There's a narrow deliverability exemption, but only for suppression/list hygiene: retain only the date (not timestamp) of the last known open, and only if that data never feeds back into marketing.

• France's deadline for legacy lists is July 14th, 2026, and Italy's is October 28th, 2026.

• This isn't just a French problem; the EDPB's reasoning behind it applies across the E.U.

🧠 Right… now, for the hard part: what do we need to think about, and what do we need to do?

And remember, none of this is legal advice. 😉

"Just Separate Deliverability Data From Marketing Data"

Sounds straightforward, right? 🤷‍♂️

In theory: “Put the beans over there, the rice over here. Done and done. In reality, most email platforms don't distinguish between those use cases at all… Open data flows simultaneously through segmentation, automation, reporting, and suppression.”

It's all one messy signal doing four different jobs at once, and Lauren Meyer described it perfectly as a seven-year-old's plate after Taco Tuesday. 😂

I agree with Lauren, while you might be reading this and saying, “we know we can’t use opens for segmentation”,…that’s not what is actually happening.

Here's the thing… I do it. You probably do it, and as Lauren argues, it’s not because we think it's perfect, but because opens are the most accessible signal across most platforms, and everything else tends to live somewhere else.”

🚨 Building that separation isn't a settings change. For most programmes, it's a rearchitecture. And most ESPs aren't built for it yet.

The Knock-on Effects That Aren't Being Talked About Enough

🧠 Beyond the compliance mechanics, there are some downstream consequences worth thinking through.

Your Analytics Will Skew

Once tracking becomes opt-in, open rates no longer represent your full audience. It represents the self-selected subset who agreed to be tracked, usually those who are privacy-indifferent or highly loyal.

Drawing conclusions about your broader audience from that pool will lead you astray.

Your Automations May Misfire

Imagine a subscriber who opts out of tracking but reads every single email you send.

🚨 On your platform, they look completely inactive. Your sunset logic kicks in. You send a "we miss you" email. You eventually remove them. And they never understood why, because they never stopped reading.

That's a real outcome under this framework, and at the moment, I’d guess most platforms have no way to prevent it. (Speaking as someone who recently discovered hundreds of his own subscribers never click anything despite opening everything. 🫠 🤦‍♂️)

Your A/B Tests Lose Precision

🚨 Testing subject lines or send times against open rates loses statistical reliability when you're measuring only a fraction of the audience.

You'll be forced to rely on clicks and conversions, smaller sample sizes, and longer attribution windows.

💡 Conclusions could take longer to reach and are harder to act on.

"Just Use Clicks Instead!" (also Not That Simple)

"Just use clicks instead!" is the obvious response to all of this, 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:

The 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 avoiding tracked links, too.

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

The Legal Problem

🚨 Tracked clicks are not automatically outside privacy scrutiny either. The EDPB's own Guidelines 2/2023, which CNIL explicitly cites, also cover tracking links and pixels.

Tracked clicks that depend on recipient-specific identifiers in links can raise the same ePrivacy questions as open pixels.

🧠 Clicks are a better signal than opens. But swap one for the other and call it done? That's not a strategy. Build a broader, more defensible signal mix.

What You Actually Need to Do

🚨 You may not agree with everything below, and you may have points to add, but before implementation, talk to your legal team before making compliance decisions.

Note that a "recommendation" from a regulator can quickly become something else entirely when enforcement begins.

💡 Some of the things I’m suggesting you might not be able to do with your ESP right now, {{first_name|friend}}, and for me, that’s the case.

Audit Your Tracking Use

Map every flow that uses individual open data.

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

These now have different rules and different legal bases.

Review Your Signup Flows

Engagor argues the cleanest way to collect tracking consent is at the point of email address collection:

“Trying to collect it retroactively via a tracked email is, at minimum, ironic, and potentially non-compliant if the consent-collection email itself contains a pixel.”

If You Collect Email Addresses Offline

💡 Think events, in-store, even over the phone, you need to send a tracker-free initial email asking for tracking preferences.

If someone doesn't respond, silence must be treated as a refusal, not implied consent. And, as a good practice, CNIL says not to re-ask for six months.

Notify Existing Subscribers

France by July 14th, Italy by October 28th. This is a notification-and-opt-out requirement for legacy lists, not a full re-opt-in (but it still needs to be designed, built, and sent).

Add a Tracking Consent Withdrawal Link to your Email Footer

💡This is separate from a normal unsubscribe.

It’s a one-click, no-re-entry of the email address, effective immediately. And it needs to work for emails already in the inbox, not just future sends.

🤔 I don’t even think I can turn off tracking at a global level in Beehiiv, and I definitely can’t do it for an individual subscriber.

Check Your Open Data Storage

Under the deliverability exemption, you should retain only the date (not the timestamp) of the last known open, and overwrite it with each new interaction.

If your ESP is storing a full engagement history, that architecture is non-compliant even under the exemption.

🚨 For now, I imagine that’s outside of every ESP user’s control, and even a data erasure request for open data might not be possible for some ESPs.

Shift Toward Outcome Signals

💡 Clicks and conversions where you have consent to track them, complaints and unsubscribe behaviour, and replies are not impacted. The consent requirement is specific to tracking pixels.

Downstream signals that don't depend on pixel firing are not in scope.

What This Means for ESPs

Technical Requirements

🚨 According to BCLP, given the complexity of the requirements and the absence of ready-made compliance solutions on the market, early legal and technical advice will be essential.

🤔 Most email platforms build tracking on static pixel URLs generated at the time of send. To comply with the retroactive withdrawal requirement (where a user who withdraws consent today should stop being tracked, even for emails already in their inbox), ESPs need to move to a dynamic pixel architecture: a real-time consent check before logging any event.

That's a significant infrastructure rebuild. And, how that can/will be implemented is beyond me. 🫠

Liability

💡 There's also a liability question.

If an ESP uses pixel data for its own purposes, such as improving deliverability algorithms or refining anti-fraud products, it may be classified as a joint controller, not just a data processor.

That requires a formal agreement. Marketers should be reviewing their data processing agreements accordingly.

🚨 Inside Privacy raises another issue whereby controllers relying on third parties should consider how they will obtain evidence of consent from those third parties.

A contractual clause requiring one party to collect valid consent on behalf of another is not sufficient on its own. That applies to ESPs, list providers, CDPs, enrichment vendors, and analytics partners.

What do ESPs Need to Build?

💡 I do feel this is for ESPs to solve primarily, and I’m not an ESP, but these are some areas they could consider, and we should be asking our ESPs about:

• Consent status fields at the contact level for tracking, separate from marketing opt-in.

• Conditional pixel deployment: only fire the pixel if the tracking consent flag is TRUE at the time of send.

• Dynamic consent routing, real-time pixel load check, blank response for withdrawn contacts.

• Open data retention set to date-only of last known open, overwriting previous value, not a full engagement history.

• Granular opt-out from tracking, independent of unsubscribe.

• Audit-ready consent records per contact.

🤓 That’s just some of my thoughts, and I’ve no idea how to implement them, but I know there are smarter people out there who will figure this out.

Where Is This All Heading?

🚨 The compliance burden poses significant challenges. It could be argued that this falls on business owners, but I also believe email marketers have a responsibility to educate and inform.

So whilst it might seem daunting, the community needs to move toward, not just away from, the changes that are coming.

🧠 The organisations that come out of this well are the ones that stop treating privacy as a cost and start treating it as a different kind of relationship with their audience.

A Preference Centre Resurgence?

In practice, that looks like preference centres where subscribers tell you what they're interested in, how often they want to hear from you, and whether they're comfortable being tracked.

It’s work upfront, but the data you get back is more accurate, inherently compliant, and far more interesting to act on than an open rate that may or may not be Apple MPP, a security bot, or a prefetch.

🚨The only reliable signal left is the one willingly and knowingly provided by the subscriber (hello Zero-Party and First-Party data).

Before You Go

🤔 In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned Lauren Meyer’s post on this (go read it if you haven’t), and I want to leave you with this question on the “how” side of this:

• How do you separate deliverability use from marketing use inside real-world platforms and data pipelines?

Do you have any answers, {{first_name|friend}}?

I don’t have any answers right now, but I’m going to have to come up with some.

I’m also wondering why France’s deadline is Bastille Day, and a national holiday… does that give us an extra day? 😂

That’s it for this week. 👋

🎉 Come join me this Thursday at 9:30am ET / 2:30pm UTC for a live podcast interview as James Kemp and Katie Keith from Do The Woo discuss WooCommerce stores’ under-use of email and what to fix first.

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:

• 🤯 Wait…What! - Gen Zers are making thousands of dollars a month running snail-mail subscription clubs. (CNBC)

• Paul Airy - “Email accessibility is something done by people for people”. (Paul Airy & Stripo)

• Key Takeaways - Why Legitimate Senders End Up on Blocklists. (Lauren Meyer, Melinda Plemel)

• 😎 RGE Studio - The next era. (Really Good Emails & Beefree)

• Not What You Think - Your warm-up tool is lying to you. (Pavel Ivanishchev)

• Designing for Reality - Dark Mode, Accessibility, and the Modern Inbox. (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 #238 of All About Email!

Last week, we looked at why subscribers don't click, and I shared my own very public mistake with re-engagement triggers. 🤦‍♂️

For both my publications, this mistake cost me potentially:

• 4.81% of Loop WP's active subscribers

• 7.86% of All About Email's active subscribers

This week, two European regulators may have closed a very important grey area in email marketing.

Let’s go! 👇

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“France Banned Email Open Tracking!"

You may have seen this take flying around the email community this week.

Alison Gootee put it best: they're not exactly right. But they're not exactly wrong, either.

I've got a lot to cover, so this is Part 1 of 2: “the regulatory story”, what was actually decided, and why it matters way beyond France.

🚨 TLDR: Individual open tracking now requires explicit consent. Is the regulatory grey area officially closed?

• On April 14th, 2026, France's CNIL published its formal recommendation on tracking pixels in email, Deliberation n° 2026-042, adopted on March 12th, 2026.

• On April 17th, 2026, Italy's Garante adopted its own guidelines. Provision No. 284 - covering the use of tracking pixels in email communications, intended for all entities, both public and private, that use such tracking tools for any purpose.

💡 Let’s dig in, and note, none of this is legal advice, and I may have misunderstood some of this guidance (I’ve been reading a lot).

Loop in your DPO (if you have one) before making compliance decisions. 😉

Should this come as a Surprise?

This didn't come from nowhere, although it seems to have caught many in the community by surprise.

CNIL opened a public consultation on tracking pixels in June 2025, closed it in July 2025, and then published the final recommendation in April 2026.

💡 Nomos states:

• The application of Article 82 to tracking pixels in emails remains largely unresolved, and the vast majority of consent-collection mechanisms deployed to date do not include a specific request for these technologies.

• By formalising this interpretation and announcing enforcement actions, the CNIL is de facto imposing new operational requirements on market participants.

What the CNIL said

🚨 In my understanding, this is currently guidance, not a new law, as Alison Gootee puts it, it's a signal of how CNIL plans to enforce existing ePrivacy/GDPR rules in France.

The CNIL's position is that tracking pixels fall under the same legal framework as cookies, governed by Article 82 of the French Data Protection Act and the ePrivacy Directive.

💡 Here's what's now required:

• Consent is the default. The CNIL generally requires the recipient's prior consent. This regime imposes immediate obligations on any organisation using email as a communication or marketing channel. (BCLP)

• Consent to email ≠ consent to track. Permission to email someone does not automatically include permission to track their behaviour. These are legally independent. In some cases, a single consent “can” cover both direct marketing emails and closely related pixel purposes, provided the choice architecture is genuinely clear and purpose-specific. The shorthand of "mandatory double consent in all cases" is stricter than what CNIL actually says. (Twilio)

• Consent withdrawal works retroactively. When a user withdraws tracking consent, that change applies even to pixels in emails already sent. A reopened email should not fire a tracking call after consent has been withdrawn. (engagor)

• B2B is not safe. Commercial B2B emails cannot rely on a general opt-out framework to avoid this requirement. (engagor)

• Aggregate stats are fine, but with conditions. Aggregate, anonymised statistics remain exempt, but only where the pixel is identical for all recipients and cannot be traced back to individuals. (engagor)

• Fraud analysis isn't exempt either. The CNIL specifies certain cases in which consent is required: email open rates, the creation of recipient profiles, and the detection and analysis of suspected fraud. (BCLP)

🤔 There is a lot to be said here about data and not just privacy, and I’ll be reflecting on this in Part 2 next week.

There are Two Strict Deliverability Exemptions

💡 The draft CNIL recommendation was silent on deliverability use cases, which caused real concern in the industry. The final version addressed that.

The final recommendation explicitly recognises two exemptions from the consent requirement for individual deliverability measurement:

• Security measures related to authentication.

• Deliverability measurement for cleaning inactive contacts, only for transactional emails or emails for which consent to receive has been collected.

🚨 But the small print matters. For the exempted use:

• Only the date, and without the time of the last known open, can be retained.

• Complete individual open histories are no longer compatible with this deliverability purpose.

🤔 So, under the exemption, you can keep the date of the last open. Not the timestamp. And it gets overwritten each time.

Your standard ESP engagement log, which stores every open event across months or years, is non-compliant for this purpose even under the exemption.

🧠 And the exemption is strictly scoped. If you use open data for engagement-based segmentation, send-time optimisation, or personalisation or targeting, explicit consent is required.

The B2B Prospecting Paradox

💡 There's a specific B2B consequence that warrants attention:

• According to BCLP, a commercial email may still be sent to a business contact without prior consent. However, if that email contains a pixel, that pixel is subject to consent, regardless of the applicable regime for the email itself.

🤔 So you can legally send the prospecting email. You just can't legally know if they opened it.

“Companies that relied on the B2B opt-out to avoid consent obligations will find the operational benefit of that regime considerably reduced.” (BCPL)

🚨 I am not a B2B expert, but I want to highlight that, as a sole trader in the UK and “not” a limited company, under PECR, I am treated as an individual, and the method of B2B emails outlined above can’t be legally sent to me.

However, this doesn’t stop me from receiving endless cold B2B emails. 🫠

Italy's Garante - Similar, but Not Identical

🧠 Italy's ruling is worth understanding separately because some coverage conflates it with the CNIL. They're not the same.

The Garante classifies tracking pixels as an operation that falls within the scope of access to the user's terminal under Article 122 of the Privacy Code, thereby implementing the ePrivacy Directive.

A practical difference from France: 

• The Garante accepts, in the interests of simplification and to avoid "consent fatigue", that consent to tracking pixels may be included within the more general consent to receive promotional communications, provided that the request is formulated in a neutral and non-coercive manner.

💡 So, France requires independent consent for tracking, whereas Italy allows bundling if it's genuinely neutral.

Italy's no-consent room is arguably tighter in one respect:

• Italy leans more heavily on fully anonymised aggregate statistics as the exemption, rather than France's individual-level deliverability exemption.

The overall direction is the same, but the exemptions are shaped differently.

💡 Both require easy granular withdrawal. The user must be able to revoke their choice in a granular manner:

• Either revoke tracking consent only while continuing to receive emails

• Or, withdrawing entirely.

The Deadlines

France (CNIL)

• 🗓️ For email addresses collected before April 14th, controllers may continue using pixels provided they give recipients appropriate information about pixel use by July 14th, 2026.

• 🗓️ New subscribers from April 14th onward: full consent required from day one.

Italy (Garante)

• 🗓️ October 28th, 2026. Six months from publication in the Official Gazette. Same structure, notify existing subscribers and provide a simple way to object.

Enforcement

🚨 CNIL has already spelt out the enforcement sequence.

The CNIL plans to support organisations in the coming months through webinars and other resources to help them understand and implement the recommendations effectively.

After the adaptation period, the CNIL will incorporate compliance with these rules into its future control and enforcement activities.

And if you're wondering how seriously to take this, the regulator has already demonstrated what it's prepared to do when warnings are ignored:

• CNIL imposed a €325 million fine on Google on September 1st, 2025, for displaying advertisements in Gmail without prior user consent, under the same Article 82 that governs tracking pixels.

This applies to More than just France & Italy

EU data protection authorities operate as a network and routinely reference each other's decisions. The legal principles in this recommendation apply identically under the GDPR and ePrivacy in Germany, the Netherlands, Spain, and every other EU member state.

💡 Lauren Meyer raised a practical point here, too: figuring out who is "French" versus not, or where someone is at the time of interaction, isn't clean.

This raises a real question about whether more teams will move toward a single, broader standard rather than segmenting compliance by geography (which brings its own complications).

Postmastery states: “…this text does not come out of nowhere. It follows directly from the 2020 cookies recommendation and the EDPB guidelines published in October 2024. The logic is the same: any mechanism that passively reads information from a user's terminal is regulated. Email pixels are no exception.”

🧠 And the deeper point is this: regulation is being imposed on top of an already-weakening measurement stack. Open rate was already becoming less trustworthy:

• Apple MPP,

• Google's prefetching,

• And now, formal regulatory guidance from two EU authorities in the same week.

🚨 The CNIL hasn't created a new problem. It's formalised one that's been building for years. As Alison Gootee puts it: “…if your strategy depends on opens, you're standing on a floor that keeps getting pulled out from under you.”

Before You Go

🧠 Next week, in Part 2, we get into the part that briefly made me stop thinking about my click-engagement mess-up last week. 😂

• Why is separating deliverability data from marketing data so hard in practice

• What do you actually do about all this?

• And what do your ESPs need to build?

🤔 One question to sit with until then:

• Does your current ESP have any way to fire a pixel only for contacts who have given tracking consent, and suppress it for those who haven't? (Not hiding the metric. Actually suppress the pixel.)

🚨 I know my ESP (Beehiiv) doesn’t.

That's it for Part 1, {{first_name|friend}}.

Please note, there is no Email Marketing News & Tips section, as this email is huge and it gets clipped.

See you next 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.

🎂 🎉 The All About Email playlist is one year old! We don’t quite have 55 tracks, but 45 will do. 😉 

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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.

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 #237 of All About Email!

Last week was about using an actionable framework for creating Welcome Sequences that actually work.

This week, I “might” have made a very big mistake after changing my re-engagement automation trigger, which sent an email to almost my entire list! 🤦‍♂️

This has prompted me to ask the question, “Why don’t subscribers click”?

Let’s go! 👇

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BEFORE You Read Any Further

🤦‍♂️ On Friday, I changed my re-engagement automation trigger criteria to be based on “clicks only” over a set period of time (the previous was “clicks and opens” over a set period of time).

This was then retrospectively applied (I wasn’t expecting this) to every subscriber, and chaos ensued.

Why Don’t Email Subscribers Click Links?

I know some people don’t click links, which is why my original criteria used “opens and clicks” over a set period, but with open rates becoming even less reliable recently (thanks, Gmail), I decided to switch to “clicks only” over a set period.

That time period is 90 days. I could be more aggressive and set it to 60 days, or even 30 days, but my thinking was always: “Surely a subscriber would click on at least one link in 90 days?”

It turns out I was wrong! 🤦‍♂️

I was shocked, after all, that’s about 12 issues with each issue containing an average of 28 links, so how could someone not click 1 of 336 links?

💡 Most of my emails get “clipped” (just like this one), so the most obvious answer for me is “clipping”, as this can impact click tracking.

🤔 But this got me thinking… why else might people not click on links in my emails (and yours, {{first_name|friend}})?

Privacy & Tracking Concerns

Click Tracking Rewrites URLs

This one might be a bit of a stretch, but I’ve done it before, so here goes…most email platforms wrap every link in a tracking redirect so they can log who clicked, when, and on what device.

A privacy-conscious reader may hover over a link, see that it doesn't go where the anchor text says, and refuse to click. They don't trust where it's actually taking them.

🚨 Or, again, I sometimes do this: copy the destination URL, strip the tracking parameters, and paste it into a browser manually. The click never registers, but the content is consumed.

Pixel Tracking Awareness

Open tracking works by embedding a tiny invisible image (a 1×1 pixel). Privacy-savvy readers know this exists. Some block all remote images entirely, but more relevantly, the same readers who block open tracking are also the ones most likely to be wary of clicking tracked links.

It's a similar mindset to the “URL rewrites”. If they're already protecting their open data, they're protecting their click data too.

🤔 I wonder how many of my readers genuinely enjoy my content but don't want the relationship to become transactional or tracked. They're happy to read; they're not happy to become a data point.

Blocked Domains & Edge Cases

Corporate security tools can distort your click data in both directions. We know about bots inflating click rates, but occasional proxy behaviour may suppress it.

These possible edge cases where tracking breaks if a proxy caches the redirect and doesn't re-fire it on a human click, or if a company's security policy blocks the tracking redirect domain entirely.

Employer & Workplace Context

🚨 This one is a bit alien to me as I’ve worked for myself for so long, so if I have my tin hat on or get things wrong, apologies in advance. 😂

Corporate Email Monitoring

Many employees use work email addresses to subscribe to newsletters. Their IT department may have full visibility into outbound click traffic.

An employee reading about job searching, competitor products, mental health resources, or anything politically adjacent may not click because they don't want that activity logged against their work account.

Fear of Triggering a Security Alert

In highly regulated industries: finance, law, healthcare, government, clicking unusual links, even from newsletters you knowingly subscribed to, can trigger a security review or a message from IT.

So readers in these environments might be more cautious or never click.

I have even seen first-hand non-regulated industries that have IT departments who deliberately simulate compromised links as security tests for employees to see who clicks them/ 😬

Reading Personal Content on a Work Device

Someone reads your newsletter during lunch on their work laptop. The content is personal, and they'd rather not leave a digital trail at work.

So they save it to read later on a personal device...and then forget.

Technical Issues

Security Software

Some antivirus software or browser extensions will flag click-tracking redirects as suspicious and either block the click or show a warning.

🚨 Even a single scary warning is enough to make a reader stop clicking from that sender entirely.

Paywalled or Login-Required Page

😡 I hate this one, it’s a pet peeve of mine (I understand why it happens, but I don’t have to like it).

If the reader has been burned before, clicked a link and hit a paywall or login wall, they'll stop clicking from that sender.

✅ I won’t share links in my newsletters that require a paywall or login, unless I know the link is very valuable, and I will give a warning.

AI Inbox Summaries

💡Tools like Gmail's AI summaries, Apple Intelligence's email summarisation, and Microsoft Copilot in Outlook are increasingly surfacing condensed versions of email content directly in the inbox.

(Sometimes, before the reader has even opened the message.)

🫠 If the summary captures the core point of your newsletter well enough, the reader gets what they need without entering the email, let alone clicking a link.

Psychological & Behavioural Reasons

Clickbait Links

The “curiosity gap” can work against you if stretched too far.

🤔 Readers who feel a link text is manipulating them, teasing without informing, will sometimes refuse to click on purpose.

I know I think/do this often.

Fear of Entering a Funnel

Experienced readers, especially those who work in marketing, know that clicking a link can trigger retargeting, lead scoring, segment changes, and follow-up sequences.

💡 They're not avoiding the content; they're avoiding what might potentially come with the click.

Too Many Links

🚨 If an email has too many links, readers often click none of them (with an average of 28 links per newsletter, it’s always on my mind).

Deciding which link to click becomes harder than clicking nothing.

💡 A newsletter full of interesting links can perform well as a reading product, but poorly if you need one specific conversion.

Fewer, more purposeful links drive more clicks.

They've Already Seen the Content Elsewhere

💡 This one is always on my mind, especially if you're curating widely shared content; the reader may have already read it.

Clicking confirms nothing new for them.

The Email Is Too Long or Heavy

🧠 If the email is dense, analytical, or requires real thinking, the reader may be mentally tired by the time they reach the CTA (on that note, congratulations if you’ve made it this far, {{first_name|friend}} 😂).

The click requires a cognitive change, from passive reading to active decision, and the reader has no capacity left.

Longer, more demanding emails may paradoxically suppress clicks even when engagement is high (I’m about ready to give up, and I’m the one writing this 🫠 ).

Link Blindness

The same concept as banner blindness in display advertising.

🚨 Readers who see your newsletter regularly develop unconscious patterns of where they look and what they skip.

Sponsor links in a consistent position, footer CTAs, repeated "read more" buttons…over time, these become literally invisible to the trained eye.

💡 The reader isn't deciding “not” to click; they're not even registering that the link exists.

Reader Persona

The Newsletter as a Final Destination

I’m not talking about the horror franchise Final Destination (although I might have killed a large portion of this newsletter 😂), but for some readers, a well-curated newsletter is the way they treat a morning newspaper (remember those?); “the summary is the product”.

They have no intention of ever leaving their inbox. For this persona, a non-click is their consumption mode. They may be among your most loyal readers, consistently opening every issue, and your click analytics will never reflect that.

🚨 And I’ve just found out that it applies to hundreds of my subscribers. 

They subscribe to Your Perspective, Not Your Links

🧠 Some readers follow a newsletter for the writer's opinions and voice.

The external link is secondary; they've already got what they came for once they've read your framing.

They Read Passively

💡 A lot of email reading happens between tasks: commuting, in bed, in a waiting room, during lunch. Clicks require a transition from passive reading to active action, and that’s often where “click intent” stops.

(Side note, apparently I love to write passively, and Grammarly loves to tell me so. 😂)

They Disagree, But Still Read

Readers may open and read because the topic is relevant, but not click because they're sceptical or unconvinced.

They're a Competitor or Researcher

🤷‍♂️ Rightly or wrongly, I don’t really care about competitors as I don’t think I’m in a competition, but this point is relevant for many of you:

Someone doing a competitive analysis, another newsletter operator, a vendor, or a journalist may read carefully and deliberately not click, precisely to avoid being registered in your tracking data.

Consent & Comfort With Being Tracked

They Know Clicks Trigger Automation

Experienced email readers, especially those who work in marketing themselves, know that clicking a link often triggers a tag, a segment change, or an automated follow-up sequence.

💡 They deliberately don't click because they don't want to be put into a nurture flow or have their behaviour profile updated.

Unspoken Opt-Out

🚨 This reason is probably the most thought-provoking, given the context of this email.

A reader who is gradually disengaging, not quite ready to unsubscribe, will stop clicking first (unless they were never clicking in the first place, as I’ve discovered 🫠).

The Topic is Sensitive

💡 People may avoid clicking links related to health, money, debt, legal issues, employment, competitors, politics, relationships, or mental health, even if the content itself is entirely innocent.

The act of clicking records something about them, and some topics don't feel safe to register interest in.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t include all my reasons for why a link doesn’t get clicked, but did I miss something big, {{first_name|friend}}?

Are there any reasons you’ve encountered why someone doesn’t click on an email that I’ve not included today?

Reply and let me know.

A click is so much more than a measure of interest or engagement, and most of those variables we’ve discussed above are outside your control as a sender.

🫠 As I discovered today after messing up my click-based triggers, some of your most engaged readers may never click a thing.

In fact, a good email can actually reduce clicks by satisfying the reader before they need to click anywhere else.

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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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:

• Shadow IT and Email - The Tools Sending on Your Behalf Without You Knowing. (Sender Audit)

• DKIM2 - What is it and how do VERP and asynchronous bounce processing fit? (Al Iverson & Valimail)

• 🧠 What’s Actually Happening? - Email Myths that are hurting your deliverability. (Lauren Meyer)

• New Wrinkles - Can You Use Claude Design for Email Production? (Nicole Merlin & knak)

• 🤦‍♂️ Seriously!? - New Outlook, same headache. (Mark Robbins & Customer[dot]io)

• Making all your emails accessible - Real-world challenges and practical shortcuts. (Stripo)

• email-css-resets - A repository to hold all CSS resets/normalisation from past and present email clients. (Jay Oram)

• Further Explanation - DKIM2, Asynchronous Bounces and VERP. (Word to the Wise)

• Very Cool - New addition to CSS light-dark() function in Firefox and (more importantly) Thunderbird. (Mark Robbins)

• 😎 Directory - 100+ Email Marketers Worth Following in 2026. (Bouncer)

• DKIM2 Explained - What’s Changing and What to Do. (EasyDMARC)

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 #236 of All About Email!

Last week, we concluded our two-part series on Newsletter Reactivation.

This week is about using an actionable framework for creating Welcome Sequences that actually work.

Let’s go! 👇

HubSpot's ex-Head of Paid shares his 2026 playbook

Most paid media doesn't fail because of budget. It fails because of strategy. On Monday, April 27, we're going live with HubSpot for Startups to fix that. You'll walk away knowing:

• Which channels to prioritize and in what order (and why most people get this wrong)

• Why following up with leads within 1 minute can improve conversion by 391%

• How to set up tracking so your AI bidding actually optimizes for pipeline, not just clicks

• The top gotchas on Google and LinkedIn that quietly kill performance

Free to attend. Free ad credits for everyone who shows up live.

Save Your Spot

Welcome Sequences can be Awesome! But, how do you actually build one?

Maybe you've needed to build that welcome sequence for a while, but haven't quite got around to it. Maybe you have one, it’s been on autopilot, and you're not entirely sure it's doing what it's supposed to.

Either way, this is the practical bit. No more convincing, and no more “why”.

Just a clear, actionable framework for building a welcome sequence that works.

Step 1: Define the Purpose before you write a single word

Every welcome sequence needs a defined purpose before anything else.

You might have different goals, but the baseline is always the same:

• Welcome new subscribers.

• Introduce your brand.

• Set expectations.

• Begin a real relationship.

From there, add a secondary goal “if” your business needs one:

• Getting a first click.

• Surfacing your best content.

• Or moving subscribers toward a product or offer.

🚨 A sequence without a defined purpose is just a series of emails. Know your purpose first.

Step 2: Honour what brought them here

Whatever brought someone to your list: a lead magnet, a newsletter, a product, a specific promise, your welcome sequence needs to reflect that immediately.

✅ The first email should feel like a natural continuation of the signup experience. If your form promised one thing and your emails deliver something different, trust can drop fast and can be hard to recover.

💡 This also directly affects deliverability. Welcome sequences that feel relevant get opened. And strong engagement in those first few days can carry disproportionate weight in how inbox providers treat your future sends.

The connection between relevance and deliverability is one of the most underappreciated dynamics in email.

If deliverability is still a problem after that, check the basics: sender reputation, list hygiene, and make sure your domain is properly authenticated (SPF, DKIM, DMARC).

Even the best sequence struggles if the technical foundation isn't solid.

Step 3: Map the journey before you touch your platform

🤔 Mapping the journey is the step that saves the most time and prevents the most errors, but I wonder how many of us actually do it?

Before opening your email platform, sketch the flow somewhere outside of it: a doc, a piece of paper, a whiteboard (whatever works for you).

Decide:

• How many emails does the sequence need?

• What each one means to do.

• When each one sends.

• Where a subscriber might naturally exit the flow.

• Whether different subscribers need different paths based on how or why they signed up.

🚨 Only once the structure is clear should you start building. Jumping straight into your platform without a map is how you end up with a sequence that does too much, too soon, or in the wrong order.

Step 4: Use a simple structure as your starting point

For most brands and audiences, three to five emails is the right place to begin:

• Email 1 - Welcome and confirm what they signed up for. Send this immediately to maximise engagement.

• Email 2 - Your brand story. Who you are, why you started this, what makes you different, and why it's worth staying subscribed.

• Email 3 - Your single best piece of content, your most useful resources, or your clearest next steps.

• Email 4 - A product, offer, or deeper education if it's relevant to the relationship you're building.

• Email 5 - A reply prompt, a preference question, or a soft conversion. Something that invites a genuine response and signals there's a real person on the other end.

🧠 Not every sequence needs all five; match the length to the relationship, not to a rigid framework.

And one rule applies across every email in the sequence: “One email, one purpose.”

Define the main message, the single action you want the reader to take, and why this email belongs at this point in the relationship.

Emails that try to do too much usually do nothing particularly well.

Step 5: Test it properly before it goes live

🤔 I’m going to make an educated guess that step gets skipped more than any other, and it's the one that can cause the most problems.

Before your sequence reaches a real subscriber, walk through the entire flow with test data. 

Test:

• Triggers fire correctly.

• Delays work as expected.

• Every link goes where it should.

• Personalisation renders properly.

• Subscribers are entering and exiting at the right points.

💡 A welcome sequence that misbehaves on day one can be hard to recover from. Fifteen minutes of testing saves a lot of headaches.

Step 6: Watch the first live runs closely

🚨Once it's live, check it daily for the first few days.

Confirm subscribers are moving through the sequence correctly and that nothing is stalling, duplicating, or firing out of order.

Real sends often surface small issues that testing missed.

Step 7: Review it regularly

💡 A review is not set-and-forget. Schedule regular reviews and track the numbers that tell you whether the sequence is actually working:

• Open rates,

• Click rates,

• Replies,

• Unsubscribes,

• Drop-off by email,

• And always: is it achieving the original goal you defined in Step 1?

As a baseline, most welcome sequences achieve average open rates of 50 - 60%, click rates of 15 - 25%, and unsubscribe rates below 2%.

💡 Those statistics vary by industry, but you can use them as a reference point for how your sequence stacks up.

🔧 When something isn't working, fix the weakest point first, and use A/B testing to validate your changes rather than guessing:

• Low opens - Subject lines or send timing need attention.

• Low clicks - Calls to action are competing or unclear.

• Unsubscribe spikes - Content doesn't match what subscribers expected at signup.

• Drop-off after a specific email - That email is the weak link in the chain.

One Final Thought

💡 Your framework above isn't complicated.

But doing it intentionally, testing it properly, and reviewing it regularly puts you ahead of the majority of senders who either have nothing or have something running quietly in the background that nobody has looked at in months.

Go and read your own welcome email today. Then ask yourself honestly: “Does it earn the next open?”

If the answer is anything other than a confident “yes”, now you know what to do. 😉

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

- - - - - - - - -

(Please note: the original version of this issue first appeared as a guest post in Email Advice From A 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.

Build Webinars That Keep Working After You Stop

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Email Marketing News & Tips

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

• DKIIM2 - What it means for the future of email. (Word To The Wise)

• Screenshots Extension - Capture fast previews from local files, internal builds, and email builder previews with our screenshot browser extension. (Preflight)

• Report Illegal Content - Does anyone else have this in Gmail? [I don’t]… (LoriBeth Blaor)

• 😎 Sinceerly - Be sinceerly human. AI to undo your AI writing. (Ben Horwitz)

• Introducing Mailgun Inspect - A powerful new email preview and QA platform fully integrated into the high-performance Mailgun Platform. (Mailgun)

• The Email Open Fallacy - What drives email opens is not what you think... (Email Advice In Your Inbox)

• Unspam 2026 Recap - AI, email relevance, and trust are reshaping deliverability and engagement. Here are ideas to take from Unspam 2026. (Really Good Emails)

• AI and the Inbox - How to Optimize Emails for Summaries and Extractions. (Inbox Monster)

• List Hygiene - The Case for Reactivation (and Sunsetting). (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 #235 of All About Email!

Last week, we began a two-part series on Newsletter Reactivation. I really tried cramming everything into one newsletter, but no one is reading almost 2,500 words in one email. 😂

This week, we conclude with Part Two as we look at:

• A Simple Reactivation Sequence.

• What These Emails Should Sound Like.

• Suppress or Unsubscribe? (they are different).

• Results and some final thoughts.

Let’s go! 👇

Preflight QA for Email

Preflight is a new email testing service built with a fresh and opinionated perspective on how modern testing should work.

Check your email accessibility, rendering, and delivery before you send.

Sponsored

Get Your 14-Day Free Trial

🧠 Part Two is the practical side of our two-part series, but context is important, especially as to how you think about Reactivation, Suppression, and List Health.

So, if you haven’t read Part One, make sure you do that now or after reading Part Two below. 👇

A Simple Reactivation Sequence

If I were keeping it simple for a newsletter, I’d use a short sequence like that described in Issue 220.

I won’t go into the setup details now, or the email content, you can do that later (and pay heed to the trigger condition, remember, it’s nuanced and I’m working on it 🤭).

But here’s the outline of the sequence I currently use:

Email One

• Address the subscriber's inactivity without being creepy or pushy.

• Share one or two links to popular content.

• Offer one clear above-the-fold CTA to stay subscribed.

Email Two

• Acknowledge that the subscriber and the inbox are busy, and they might have missed email one.

• Offer one clear above-the-fold CTA to stay subscribed.

• Let them know that if they don’t click the CTA, they will be removed in a few days.

Email Three

• Say goodbye to the subscriber and wish them all the best.

• Offer one clear, above-the-fold CTA to encourage resubscription.

What These Emails Should Sound Like

🚨 A lot of reactivation emails fail because the tone is all wrong.

They’re either (and we’ve all had one of these):

• Desperate

• Passive-aggressive

• Over-designed

• Full of fake urgency

• Weirdly emotional for what is really a simple permission check.

The best reactivation emails are:

• Clear

• Brief

• Honest

• Easy to act on

💡 The goal is to make the subscriber’s choice easy.

Suppress or Unsubscribe?

This is where reactivation becomes a list management decision, and that’s going to look different for each of us, {{first_name|friend}}.

Because once someone has gone quiet, and once you’ve given them a fair chance to stay, you still need to decide what happens next.

🚨 And this part matters, because suppression and unsubscribing are not the same thing, even if they both stop someone from receiving your emails.

Suppression is usually an Internal Sending Decision

💡 Suppression is often useful when the issue is the sending strategy rather than consent.

If you suppress someone, you’re deciding not to send to them anymore, often for performance or deliverability reasons, without treating that as a subscriber-led opt-out.

That can make sense when:

• You use engagement-based segmentation and want to stop sending regular campaigns to long-term inactive subscribers

• You want to protect deliverability without fully removing someone from your database

• You may want to review or re-target those subscribers later

• You’re trying to separate “not engaging right now” from “explicitly does not want this”

Unsubscribing is a Clearer Relationship Outcome

💡 Unsubscribing is usually the better path when the subscriber has made their preference obvious, either directly or indirectly.

That includes situations where:

• They clicked to opt out.

• Your reactivation sequence gave them a fair chance to stay, and they ignored it.

• You want a cleaner, simpler list with fewer grey areas (reorganisation).

• You don’t have a strong reason to keep holding onto inactive contacts as “maybe later” records.

🧠 If suppression is about protecting your sending, unsubscribing is more about acknowledging that the relationship has ended, or at least gone dormant in a more final way.

Which Should You Choose?

Holding onto dead weight because it feels uncomfortable isn't a strategy.

• If your setup is simple and your goal is a healthy, engaged list, unsubscribing inactive subscribers after a fair reactivation process is often the cleanest option.

• If your setup is more advanced and you rely heavily on segmentation, lifecycle stages, or multi-channel orchestration, suppression may make more sense as an intermediate step.

💡 What matters is that you don’t keep people forever just because deleting or unsubscribing feels uncomfortable.

A Good Result Might Look Smaller

💡 A reactivation campaign that leads to fewer subscribers is not necessarily bad news (something I am constantly saying).

In fact, it can be a sign that your list is becoming healthier.

You may end up with:

• Better engagement rates,

• More reliable performance data,

• Fewer unengaged sends,

• A more accurate picture of what your audience actually wants.

✅ Bigger is not always better.

A smaller list of people who genuinely want your emails is usually more valuable than a larger list padded with dead silence.

🎉 Your deliverability and reduced ESP bill will also thank you!

Final Thoughts

Inactive subscribers do not mean you’ve failed; it’s part and parcel of what we do; however, ignoring inactivity forever is not a strategy either.

💡 A good reactivation approach is thoughtful, measured, and based on better signals than opens alone. It respects the audience, protects the list, and helps you make cleaner decisions over time.

🚨 And maybe most importantly, it reminds us of something easy to forget: a subscriber list is not just a potential sales database or a trophy cabinet; it’s about relationships.

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.

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

Learn more

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:

• 🎉 Beyond Discounts and Flows - Simon Harper on building smarter eСommerce email systems. (Stripo interviewed me!)

• From Launch To Growth - How To Start a Newsletter From Scratch. (EmailTooltester)

• 🤯 Cloudflare Email Service - Now in public beta. Ready for your agents. (Cloudflare)

• Best Practices - New Ways to Add Personality To Your Newsletter. (Inbox Collective)

• 🚨 Not Production Ready - Assessing ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini for HTML Email Creation. (knak)

• Are We There Yet? - When can I send to my whole list again? (Travis Hazlewood)

• React Email 6.0 - An open-source email editor you can embed in your own app, plus a new collection of templates. (Resend)

• What It Means for Senders - Gmail is now letting users change their email addresses. (Sinch Mailgun)

• 😎 New Features! - DMARC checks, Spam improvements, and Image-size checks. (Preflight)

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 #234 of All About Email!

Last week, I was inspired by Megan Boshuyzen, and we talked about local newsletters and how to run one.

This week, we are beginning a two-part series on Newsletter Reactivation. I really tried cramming everything into one newsletter, but no one is reading almost 2,500 words in one email. 😂

Let’s go! 👇

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How Do You Think About Reactivation, Suppression, and List Health?

In the email community, “inactive subscribers” is a topic that is constantly in conversation and can bring some strong opinions.

🤷‍♂️ Some treat inactive subscribers as ticking time bombs who must be removed immediately. Others keep emailing quiet subscribers forever, hoping one day they’ll suddenly wake up, open, click, and become loyal readers again.

The truth sits somewhere in the middle, and it’s more nuanced.

🚨 I am actively working on myself (especially in light of the AI inbox), and if you’ve been a subscriber for a while, you might remember me discussing this in Issue 220, when we had a “sunset party”.

So, yes, I am calling myself out on this one. 🤭

Your Inactive Subscribers Are Not the Enemy

✅ Let’s start here: having inactive subscribers is normal, that’s just email.

It doesn’t automatically mean your newsletter is bad, your deliverability is broken, or every quiet subscriber wants to be removed.

• People get busy.

• They skim, or AI does it for them.

• They read but never click.

• They save emails “for later” and never come back.

• They change jobs, priorities, habits, and interests.

💡 The real problem is not that some subscribers go quiet. It’s when you have no idea what quiet actually means, and no plan for what to do about it.

The Big Mistake People Make

🚨 A lot of reactivation advice is too simplistic.

You’ll hear things like:

• Remove anyone who hasn’t opened in 60 or 90 days.

• Run a win-back campaign every quarter.

• If they don’t click, they’re dead weight.

• Clean your list aggressively to improve deliverability.

💡 Some of that can be useful in the right context. But without nuance, it can also be dangerous:

• Open rates are not the whole truth (not even close). If you build your whole reactivation strategy on opens alone, you’re making decisions with blurry information.

• Privacy protections, image blocking, previews, and inbox behaviour muddy the data. Some people look inactive when they aren’t. Others look active when they barely care.

🧠 Note: If you read Issue 220, you might find some of the information above regarding triggers a bit contradictory, but I wrote Issue 220 four months ago, and some things have changed/evolved.

My knowledge has improved, and I’m always testing.

What Reactivation is Actually For

A good reactivation strategy is not about squeezing one last click out of a tired subscriber.

💡 It’s about four things:

• Protecting long-term deliverability.

• Respecting the subscriber relationship.

• Giving disengaged readers an easy choice.

• Keeping your list healthier over time.

✅ A good reactivation campaign does not need to “save” everyone. It just needs to help you stop pretending every subscriber is equally engaged when they clearly aren’t.

Stop Looking at Opens Alone

If you’re trying to work out whether someone is genuinely inactive, opens should not be your only signal.

Look for stronger indicators where you can, such as:

• Click activity.

• Replies.

• Website visits from newsletter traffic.

• Purchases or conversions.

• Poll or survey activity.

• Signup source.

• How recently they joined.

• Whether they’ve ever clicked at all.

A subscriber who hasn’t opened in months but clicked two weeks ago is not the same as someone who signed up nine months ago and has done nothing since.

💡 Not all “inactive” subscribers are equally inactive. That’s why lazy or overly simplistic rules lead to bad decisions.

Define Inactivity for Your Newsletter

A daily newsletter, a weekly newsletter, and a monthly newsletter should not all use the same threshold:

• If you send weekly, someone who hasn’t engaged in 8 to 12 weeks might be worth reviewing.

• If you send monthly, you probably need a longer window.

• If you have seasonal or irregular sends, context matters even more.

🧠 Ask yourself:

• How often do I send?

• What counts as meaningful engagement?

• How quickly do subscribers usually settle into a habit?

• Is my goal traffic, replies, conversions, sponsorship value, or something else?

🚨 “Inactive” should be defined by your publishing rhythm and business model, not by a random LinkedIn post from someone selling fear (there is way too much crap advice on LinkedIn right now).

Final Thoughts

Inactive subscribers aren’t the enemy, and aggressive pruning isn’t always the answer.

💡 Smarter list health means defining inactivity in context, looking beyond opens, and using reactivation to respect readers, protect deliverability, and make better decisions over time.

Next week in Part Two, we will look at:

• A Simple Reactivation Sequence.

• What These Emails Should Sound Like.

• Suppress or Unsubscribe? (they are different).

• Results and some final thoughts.

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.

Email Still Wins. Here's How to Use It Better.

59% of Americans say most marketing emails offer no real value. That's not a threat, it's an opening. Get the AI-powered playbook for building email campaigns that actually convert.

Inside you'll discover:

• How top brands achieve 3,600% ROI from email marketing

• AI personalization techniques that drive 82% higher conversion rates

• Tactics that have delivered 30% better open rates and 50% higher clickthroughs

• How to build sequences for every stage of the customer journey, from welcome to re-engagement

Download your free AI-powered email marketing playbook today.

Get The Playbook

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:

• 30 Days of Growth - 30 Days. 30 Ways to Grow Your Newsletter. (Growth In Reverse)

• Q&A - What’s the best way to build reputation on new IPs? (EmailKarma)

• Warmup Tools - 7 Options to Improve Email Deliverability. (EmailTooltester)

• 🤯 One Spammer - Caused Gmail and email users all kinds of headaches. (Jesse Hanley)

• In Five Weeks - Grow a loyal newsletter audience with this blueprint. (Inbox Collective)

• 2026 MTA Buyers Guide - The MailOps Guide to Evaluating and Selecting an MTA. (Kumo)

• Preflight Dispatch - Lots of changes, updates and improvements to email rendering and the overall experience! (Preflight)

• 💡 Don’t Believe Everything - The spam folder and opens. (Laura Atkins)

• Does it Email? - Here I'm looking at random(), which will produce a random value each time the email is opened. (Mark Robbins)

• 🧠 Understanding “Disposable” - Disposable emails are still functionally valid addresses, and all email addresses are disposable if you think about it! (Alison Gootee)

• Acquired - Welcoming Simtheory and Ortto to Canva. (Canva)

• proofjump - Faster email campaign review and approvals [h/t Megan Boshuyzen]. (ProofJump)

• AI Import - Turn Any Email Design Into an Editable Template in Minutes with Email Love. (Email Love)

• 😎 A Cool use of AI - Maintain a healthy email audience with Audience Optimization. (Klaviyo)

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 #233 of All About Email!

Last week, I apologised and issued a full retraction of the previous week’s newsletter (Issue 231).

This week, I'm inspired by my friend Megan Boshuyzen, and it’s all about local newsletters, a topic I have never covered before.

Let’s go! 👇

Preflight QA for Email

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Want to Run a Local Newsletter?

🚨 The news publishing industry has been suffering heavily over the last couple of years from Google and AI.

While national media continues to consolidate and shrink, hyper-local publications are quietly thriving, covering town councils, restaurant openings, local sports teams, and everything in between.

But running a local newsletter is a different beast from a niche interest newsletter. You're not just competing for attention in an inbox; you're becoming part of someone's community.

🤫 I’ve been planning a local newsletter myself for almost two years!

Yes, that’s terrible, as I’ve not actually done anything except ideate, research, and buy lots of domain names. 🤦‍♂️

However, when I saw Megan’s post, it inspired me again and this week’s newsletter. 👇

🎯 Own Your Niche Within Your Niche

"Local" is not a niche. "The best things to do in Austin this weekend" is a niche. "Independent restaurant news in Edinburgh" is a niche.

The more specific your focus, the easier it is to:

• Know exactly what to write about,

• Attract the right readers (not just anyone nearby),

• Become the go-to source for “that thing” in your area.

💡 Don't try to cover everything. Be the only newsletter someone needs for one thing.

🤝 Get Out from Behind the Screen

This is the part, I guess, most newsletter operators skip, and it's where local newsletters can win or lose.

Attend local events. Go to city council meetings. Pop into the independent shops you cover. Introduce yourself.

🚨 The relationships you build offline will become your best source of tips, scoops, and word-of-mouth subscribers.

💡 People subscribe to people as much as publications.

I already struggle with this one, between client work, being a working dad and personal commitments, but I know if I wanted to make a local newsletter work, I couldn’t ignore this one forever.

📬 Consistency Beats Virality

Local audiences are loyal, but they need a reason to stay. A reliable send schedule, whether that's every Tuesday morning or every Friday afternoon, builds habit.

Your readers will start to look forward to your emails landing in their inboxes. Miss a week without explanation, and you'll feel it in your unsubscribe rate.

Set a schedule you can actually maintain.

💡 One great issue a week beats three rushed ones.

Beehiiv recently released their MCP, and I’m a beta tester, which has given me lots of ideas for creating consistency in local newsletters, not necessarily in writing the content (I like to do that), but:

• Automated Information gathering,

• Automated data population,

• Automated drafts of newsletters at scale for segments for me to edit, format and rewrite as appropriate.

💰 Think Local-First for Monetisation

National sponsorships are great, but local advertisers are your secret weapon.

The dentist down the road, the new café that just opened, the local estate agent, these businesses want to reach exactly the audience you've built, and they often can't access it anywhere else.

A simple rate card and a one-pager explaining your audience is enough to start those conversations.

Don't overthink it…like me. 🤦‍♂️

There are also paid subscription models and other monetisation options to consider.

🌱 Grow Through the Community, Not Just the Algorithm

The best local newsletter growth doesn't come from SEO or paid ads; it comes from putting yourself where your potential readers already are.

Megan’s post on LinkedIn inspired this newsletter, and as well as getting some advice from me… 👇

• Go offline to grow online - Put up posters around town with a QR code sign-up link, and look for opportunities to get it into local print. At in-person events, have an iPad ready so people can sign up on the spot, and avoid collecting emails on paper if you can.

• Use the social media you're already on - If you're on Facebook/Meta, cross-posting to Instagram is a natural extension.

Some members of the community also chimed in… 👇

• Run a local competition - Offer a prize relevant to your audience — a voucher for a local café, or something donated by a local business. Free entry with a newsletter sign-up, plus bonus entries for referrals, is a powerful combo. (Jay Oram)

• Partner with local businesses or creators - Contribute content to someone else's newsletter or platform. It puts you in front of an already-engaged local audience without building from scratch. (Katelyn Baughan)

💡 Make every local event count - Any event you attend is a chance to promote the newsletter. Have something physical ready: a card, a poster, a QR code, and don't be shy about it!

Running a local newsletter is genuinely hard work (I should know, I’ve been researching and testing for almost two years 😂), but the connection you build with a real, physical community is something no national publication can replicate.

That's the magic of it. ✨

Before You Go

🚨 Hat tip to Al Iverson, who brought a cool tool to my attention for the first time!

Ever wondered if it’s you or if there’s something wrong with the receiver’s mailbox?

Groups[dot]io might be able to help with real-time email delivery metrics across major providers.

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.

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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:

• Risilience, Reliability & Delivery - We migrated our email infrastructure to KumoMTA. Here's why it matters. (Postmark)

• Owning Attention - The 2026 State of Customer Engagement Report. (OneSignal)

• TLS for Mail - M³ AAWG Baseline Recommendations. (M³AAWG)

• What Do You Think? - Using display:flex and display:grid in email. (Mark Robbins)

• Email Detective - See which ESP sent any email in Gmail. Detects 100+ providers and shows SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication. (EmailTooltester)

• This has me thinking - Do we really NEED a 5 email welcome series when it could be 3 emails? Or even 1 email? (Emily Ryan)

• Embedded Content Creation - Key reasons why these and thousands of other applications rely on Beefree SDK. (Beefree)

• Play The Game - Crack the Egg. Find the Magic (ActionRocket)

• Round Two - 30 Days. 30 Ways to Grow Your Newsletter. (Growth In Reverse)

• Beyond The Inbox - Should You Host a Trip for Your Newsletter Readers? (Inbox Collective)

• Desktop Outlook - Windows Outlook (classic) screenshots now available. (Preflight)

• Announcing Podcasts - Host, distribute, and monetise your podcast directly on beehiiv. (Beehiiv)

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 #232 of All About Email!

Last week, we took a look at DKIM2, the replacement for DKIM and how it improves on the old standard.

This week, I owe you all an apology and a full retraction of last week’s newsletter. Although it turns out I did get one thing right.

Let’s go! 👇

Email Still Wins. Here's How to Use It Better.

59% of Americans say most marketing emails offer no real value. That's not a threat, it's an opening. Get the AI-powered playbook for building email campaigns that actually convert.

Inside you'll discover:

• How top brands achieve 3,600% ROI from email marketing

• AI personalization techniques that drive 82% higher conversion rates

• Tactics that have delivered 30% better open rates and 50% higher clickthroughs

• How to build sequences for every stage of the customer journey, from welcome to re-engagement

Download your free AI-powered email marketing playbook today.

Get The Playbook

🚨 🚨 UPDATE [April 24th, 2026] - One thing I did get right in last week’s Issue was how close DKIM2 is. It turns out, some mailbox providers will have it in place within the next few months, and major providers by the end of 2026.

Last week, I got it ALL Wrong

💡 Back in Issue 227, I talked about a very important email that Yahoo got completely wrong:

• How could they have made it better?

• How could they have avoided it?

• How mistakes can be content opportunities (like today’s newsletter).

Most importantly, I talked about owning your mistakes and how acknowledging them and making the correction can help restore trust, increase loyalty, and rebuild your reputation.

🚨 Well, last week I made a lot of mistakes, learned a lot, and I’m here to set the record straight and apologise.

Absolutely Gutted

😢 Last week, two wonderful and respected members of the email community reached out to me in both a constructive, fair and encouraging way.

They both held me accountable (for which I am grateful) for how badly wrong I got last week’s newsletter.

So, {{first_name|friend}}, this week I want to fully retract last week’s main content on DKIM2 and explain some things.

🤦‍♂️ I was absolutely gutted for a few days last week, which I guess is good, as it shows I care and wanted to put things right.

I immediately updated all my social media announcement posts to let readers know that things weren’t quite right and that I would be addressing them again.

What Went Wrong

🎉 A huge thank you to the two wonderful people, Laura Atkins and Ken O’Driscoll, for taking the time to correct me and educate me with grace.

Ken asked me whether my newsletter was based on an “AI-hallucination” or on an actual source. It wasn’t an AI-hallucination, unfortunately, all the mistakes were mine:

• There were two specific articles I was reading, and Laura is familiar with one of them (let’s say I was being uncharacteristically naive on this point). 🤦‍♂️

• It's also down to me, and to a misunderstanding of the technical articles (especially IETF processes) and other existing articles. 🫠

• I was also using some outdated information, and again, Laura has very kindly updated me on those.

Clarification Points

🚨 Ken outlined these fundamental issues that were wrong about last week’s newsletter:

1. First, DKIM2 is still under development; the specification has not even been agreed upon by the DKIM Working Group, so in IETF terms, it’s nothing more than a collection of draft documents at this stage. That means it’s not in production anywhere and won’t be for a good while, if ever. [See update at the top of this newsletter.]

2. Second, DKIM1 also supports the ED25519 signing algorithm (RFC 8463) since 2018.

3. Third, DKIM1 also specified mandatory headers to sign (see RFC 6376, section 5.4, etc.) and also allowed a signer to specify additional headers for signing.

Laura echoed Ken’s words and told me, “I [Laura] cannot express how much this is still not ready for even experimental deployment.”

🚨 Furthermore, Laura added:

• Folks should absolutely not be asking their providers for the roadmap.

• DMARCbis took 10 years to go through that process. The DKIM2 working group was chartered last year. We don't know how long it's going to take.

In reference to my point in last week’s newsletter on “Next Steps/Action Items for Now”, Laura provided some further advice:

• “2048 keys are not required, and some places still don't support them.”

• Updating your DKIM keys isn't relevant to DKIM2 and doesn't matter. Key rotation is usually not handled by the marketer; the ESP handles it.

• And the "understanding your email flow" is much more important for DMARC than DKIM2. The whole point of DKIM2 is that the sender doesn't need to worry about intermediaries causing delivery failures, unlike DMARC.

💡 “If” DKIM2 makes it to the production stage, Laura suggested, in the marketing space, the only change will be (when the time comes): "publish this record in DNS".

If you own infrastructure, you'll need to update it, but that's probably just plugging in a new library that's been written for you.

Sorry and Thank You Again

Thank you again to both Laura Atkins and Ken O’Driscoll for their grace, kindness and helping me make this newsletter better.

To Alison Gootee for her encouragement and to you for reading.

Apologies again, {{first_name|friend}}, I got it wrong, I’m sorry, and I hope you will continue to trust me and read my newsletter. I will do better next time.

I felt so down after last week’s email, and it’s not a feeling I want to experience again any time soon.

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.

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Email Marketing News & Tips

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

• The Ecommerce Playbook - A Practical Field Guide for Modern DTC Brands. (Mailchimp)

• Let This Sink In - 70% of phishing emails now pass DMARC authentication. (Tobias Knecht)

• $2,000 - That’s just the beginning; the cost of manual email testing. (Preflight)

• How Big is Too Big? - The Definitive Guide to Email Image Optimisation. (Let’s Talk Email)

• Responsive Emails - Written in Markdown. (Dan Stevens)

• A Lifecycle Marketer’s Edge - In the new AI world. (Naomi West)

• Stop Depending on Social - How To Start a Newsletter To Replace Social Media Reach. (Beehiiv)

• Inbound Email Protection - What DMARC can’t stop (Valimail)

• HubSpot Alternatives - Email Marketing and CRM Without Paying Thousands of Dollars a Month. (Bento)

• Things to Consider - Choosing the Right Subdomain. (Spam Resource)

• Replay - An inbox optimization guide for the AI era. (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 #231 of All About Email!

Last time was s all about Preflight, a new email preview tool (and so much more), that I am very excited about!

This week, we take a look at DKIM2, the replacement for DKIM and how it improves on the old standard.

Let’s go! 👇

Preflight QA for Email

Preflight is a new email testing service built with a fresh and opinionated perspective on how modern testing should work.

Check your email accessibility, rendering, and delivery before you send.

Sponsored

Get Your 14-Day Free Trial

🚨 BEFORE You Read Any Further

Since I originally published this issue of my newsletter, it has been brought to my attention that the main content on DKIM2 was completely wrong.

I have since printed a retraction and a follow-up clarifying my mistakes and setting things right in Issue 232.

Have you ever heard of DKIM2?

I don’t know about you, but in the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen a lot of talk about DKIM2, and if I’m being honest, I had never heard of it. 😳

For years, we’ve relied on the "Big Three" of email authentication: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. Enter DKIM2, the first major upgrade to email signatures in over a decade.

💪 It’s going to help build a stronger foundation for email security and deliverability, and that’s never a bad thing.

What exactly is DKIM2?

While the original DKIM (now sometimes referred to as DKIM1) tells a receiver "This email came from my domain," it doesn't always handle the journey well.

🚨 If an email is forwarded or slightly modified by a mailing list, the signature often "breaks," causing your message to be sent to the spam folder.

DKIM2 is designed to be resilient. It creates a verifiable "chain of custody" for your email from the moment you hit send until it hits the inbox.

Three Big Wins of DKIM2:

• Replay Protection: With DKIM1, a hacker “could steal” your valid signature and attach it to a malicious email. DKIM2 uses stricter header signing to ensure a signature only works for its original, intended destination.

• Forwarding Success: When an email passes through a service that adds a footer or changes the formatting, DKIM2 allows that service to "document" the change. This lets the final receiver verify the original signature without causing it to fail.

• Modern Cryptography: It’s faster and stronger. DKIM2 supports Ed25519, a modern signing algorithm that provides increased security with much smaller keys, keeping your DNS records lean and mean.

Technical Deep Dive

🤓 If you’re an email geek like me, you can read up on the specifics and follow along with the progress (for example, DKIM2 is heavily influenced by ARC).

If you don’t want to do that, then check out these points:

• Chain of Custody: Unlike DKIM1, which is "set and forget," DKIM2 signatures can be layered by each "hop" an email takes.

• Ed25519: The "gold standard" of digital signatures. Significantly faster and more secure than traditional RSA.

• Standardised Headers: DKIM2 mandates signing a fixed set of headers to prevent "header injection" attacks (for example, the Message-Instance header, which allows intermediaries [like forwarding server]) to "undo" changes and validate the original).

🤷‍♂️ I’m going to make a cautious prediction and suggest you can expect a long period of DKIM and DKIM2 operating side-by-side.

Next Steps?

💡 In this case, being an early adopter could be a very good thing from a security standpoint. Although I won’t be switching just yet.

Mostly because DKIM2 is a draft standard, and dedicated DKIM2 toggle switches in standard mailbox providers (like Gmail, Outlook, etc.) do not yet exist.

However, the architecture being built is designed to co-exist with existing systems.

I also won’t be switching yet because I need to understand DKIM2 better and chat with some people in the Email Geeks Slack.

As of now, DKIM2 is moving from the "experimental" phase to the "best practice" phase, and so you might want to start asking your Email Service Provider (ESP) about their DKIM2 roadmap.

Some Action Items For Now

1️⃣ Get your DKIM sorted:

• 2048-bit keys

• Clean setup across all sending sources

• Proper key rotation

2️⃣ Understand your email flow:

• What’s modifying your emails?

• Where are they being forwarded?

• What sits between the “send” and the inbox?

Because DKIM2 cares about all of that.

💡 You can read up more on DKIM2 Best Practices in the networking group document.

Before You Go

A couple of weeks ago, we took a first look at Preflight. If you haven’t checked it out yet, since then:

• The free trial has increased from 5 days to 14 days.

• The website has had a glow-up and conveys what Preflight does better (and it was already pretty good).

• Excitingly, there is no API in beta!

🎉 In our deep dive into Preflight, I did mention Mark was iterating constantly, so I can’t wait to see what the next couple of weeks hold.

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.

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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:

• What Should I Do? - “Omnichannel”: Email, SMS, and Messaging in One Platform. (Bento)

• 😎 Sender Audit - This tool verifies your email-sending domain configuration and your mail server (MTA). Free to use with reasonable usage. (Simon Bressier)

• Spam Newsletter Signups - Best Ways to Block Fake Subscribers. (emailtooltester)

• Email Deliverability in the AI Era - Why a 99% Delivery Rate is No Longer Enough. (EmailLabs)

• The 2026 Inbox Blueprint - AI, Authentication, and Seasonal Strategies. (Kickbox)

• Case Study - Why You Should Be Using SMS to Amplify Your Email Strategy. (Inbox Collective)

• Hidden Genius - 4 Creators Who Grew by Borrowing Other People’s Audiences. (Growth In Reverse)

• Inbox Placement Rates Explained - What They Actually Measure. (Lauren Meyer)

• SPF ?all - Why are you more likely to see it now? (Word to the Wise)

• Mailchimp Sections Explained - and the Best Way to Use Them Right Now. (Chimp Answers)

• Execution Speed - The System Was Always the Goal. Now It's the Starting Point. (EmailBoutique)

• Deliverability - Poppin’ off about email bounces. (Alison Gootee & Sinch Mailgun)

• Open Rates - You are thinking about them wrong. (Dan Oshinsky)

• Multi-ESP Deliverability - Why Email Deliverability Monitoring Breaks at Scale. (Engagor)

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 #230 of All About Email!

Last week was a bit of a rare self-indulgence, but I know you will find it valuable to see how I am growing my newsletter organically, with LinkedIn as a primary channel.

This week is all about Preflight, a new email preview tool, and so much more that I am very excited about!

Let’s go! 👇

Preflight QA for Email

Preflight is a new email testing service built with a fresh and opinionated perspective on how modern testing should work.

Check your email accessibility, rendering, and delivery before you send.

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Before We Start

Last week, I shared a custom dashboard of my subscriber data and engagement for LinkedIn, which is currently my biggest growth channel for this newsletter.

However, I made a rookie error and noticed Beehiiv was stripping some of my HTML code, so I quickly rebuilt the dashboard as a web page and then fixed some mobile issues (thanks, Pavel).

So if you missed it, make sure to check out last week’s newsletter for context.

Disclaimer

🚨 PreFlight sponsors this issue of All About Email (thank you again, Mark), but the timing is coincidental, and the email content is NOT sponsored, and there are no affiliate links.

Confused, {{first_name|friend}}? 😂

Basically, these thoughts and opinions on Preflight are entirely my own, and Preflight has not paid me to write this (Mark agreed to sponsor this newsletter before launching the product).

Let’s go! 👇

Introducing Preflight

If you build or send emails for a living, you’ll know the routine:

• You finish an email.

• You think it’s ready.

• Then the testing begins (this is my favourite bit 🤭).

Suddenly you’re checking dark mode, accessibility, deliverability signals, device previews… and wondering if something obvious has slipped through the cracks. 🫠

That’s exactly the problem Preflight is trying to solve.

Preflight is a new email quality assurance tool created by Mark Connell. It’s an alternative to tools like Litmus, Email on Acid, or Inbox Monster.

💡 It’s aimed squarely at developers and marketing teams who want a faster, more structured way to test emails before hitting send.

And importantly, it’s evolving quickly; Mark is constantly making changes, so by the time you read this, there will most likely be something new. 🎉

What Preflight Does

At its core, Preflight brings several key testing layers into one workflow.

You can run accessibility checks, generate device screenshots, and run a delivery audit to flag potential issues before your email reaches the inbox.

The tool is currently available in English and Spanish, and the pricing structure is refreshingly simple ($49 per month).

A Tool That’s Evolving Quickly

One interesting part of the platform is the Dispatches section, which acts like a public development log where new features and updates are shared as they’re built.

🎉 One of the more notable additions is “Test Your Email in Forced Dark Mode.”

Email accessibility advocate Mark Robbins inspired that concept and focuses on achieving a strong accessibility baseline for your campaigns.

Real Device Testing

🚀 A standout detail is how Preflight handles previews. Instead of relying purely on simulations, Preflight uses real devices to generate email previews.

That approach tends to produce more accurate rendering results across different environments.

Anyone who has debugged email clients long enough will know that simulations can sometimes miss things.

Getting Started

If you prefer not to read the rest of this email, I made a video walkthrough and demo of the platform:

Preflight Demo Walkthrough

Signing in is simple. Preflight uses Magic Link authentication, so there’s no traditional password flow.

Once you’re inside, the dashboard shows your recently tested emails along with a default folder for audits.

💡 It’s a clean interface and, at the moment, might look a bit sparse and plain; however, the upside is that it’s easy to find what you need.

Adding Emails for Testing

There are currently three ways to add an email for testing:

• Send an email directly to Preflight
• Upload an .EML file
• Paste the HTML manually

One limitation at the moment is that emails can’t yet be moved between folders, but given the pace of development, I suspect that will change.

How the Processing Works

Once your email is submitted, Preflight processes it on the server and generates results.

This includes rendering previews, accessibility checks, and delivery diagnostics.

🚨 At the moment (especially for longer emails), the last two checks can be slow, especially the final check:

• Take real Chrome browser screenshots for Desktop, Tablet, and Mobile.

• Run visual checks

Viewing Insights

When the analysis is complete, Preflight presents a breakdown of results.

You’ll see mobile previews, a list of detected issues, and a structured overview of the audit.

Many of the issues are clickable, which makes it easier to drill into the specific problem areas.

Delivery Health Checks

Preflight also looks at delivery signals.

This includes checking DKIM values, sender policies, and other indicators that might affect inbox placement.

While it’s not a full deliverability monitoring platform, it provides a useful snapshot of overall email health.

💡 DMARC checks are on the roadmap.

Sharing Results With Your Team

Once an audit is complete, you can generate shareable links.

✅ This makes it easy to share results with colleagues, designers, or clients without requiring them to log in to the platform.

For teams collaborating on campaigns, this could save a lot of back-and-forth.

Dark Mode and Contrast Testing

Preflight also includes visual contrast checks and forced dark mode previews.

This helps identify common issues like:

• Logos disappearing in dark mode
• Poor text contrast
• Background colour conflicts

💪 Given how unpredictable dark mode rendering can be across clients, this is a particularly useful addition.

Final Thoughts

Preflight is still early in its lifecycle, but it’s moving fast.

The focus on speed, accessibility, and real device previews makes it a promising addition to the email testing ecosystem.

If you’re curious, Preflight is currently offering a 5-day free trial, which is a good way to explore the platform and see how it fits into your workflow.

❤️ It’ll be interesting to watch how it develops from here, and personally, I’m loving it so far! Based on my feedback, Mark has already implemented:

• An RSS feed

• UI and UX fixes and improvements

• Some further suggestions are being considered (e.g. improved navigation)

So if you do take Preflight for a spin, make sure you give Mark your feedback so he can improve it further.

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.

How Marketers Are Scaling With AI in 2026

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• Results from over 1,500 marketers centered around results, goals and priorities in the age of AI

• Stand out content and growth trends in a world full of noise

• How to scale with AI without losing humanity

• Where to invest for the best return in 2026

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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:

• 😬 58% Open Rate - TfL hack in 2024 affected around 10 million people, BBC can reveal (not everyone got the message). (BBC)

• Brand Refresh? - How to Update Your BIMI Logo. (BIMI Group)

• Hard To Find - How Engagor Found the DKIM Bug That Microsoft Couldn't Explain. (Engagor)

• Email’s Not Dead - What the heck is the AI inbox with Al Iverson. (Sinch Mailgun)

• Hear me out - What if all these AI summaries are actually doing us all a favour? (Alison Gootee)

• Newsletter Growth - 4 Creators Who Grew by Borrowing Other People’s Audiences. (Growth In Reverse)

• News Source? - 3 in 10 Americans at least sometimes get news from newsletters, but many don’t read most of the newsletters they get. (Pew Research Center)

• What To Do Instead - Why A/B Testing Your Emails Is (Mostly) Useless. (astral)

• Email Design Elements - 11 impactful uses of email animation. (Beefree)

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 #229 of All About Email!

Last week was about turning your emails into a live experiment. 🧪

This week is a little bit of rare self-indulgence, but I know you will find it valuable. How I am growing my newsletter organically with LinkedIn being a primary channel.

Let’s go! 👇

How Marketers Are Scaling With AI in 2026

61% of marketers say this is the biggest marketing shift in decades.

Get the data and trends shaping growth in 2026 with this groundbreaking state of marketing report.

Inside you’ll discover:

• Results from over 1,500 marketers centered around results, goals and priorities in the age of AI

• Stand out content and growth trends in a world full of noise

• How to scale with AI without losing humanity

• Where to invest for the best return in 2026

Download your 2026 state of marketing report today.

Get Your Report

Growing a Newsletter Organically is Hard!

Last week, I talked about your emails becoming a live experiment as you look to improve:

• The emails themselves.

• Customer/audience relationships and engagement.

• ROI (whatever that means for you).

In the same way, my email growth strategy has been one big experiment, growing my newsletter organically.

🤑 No paid acquisition in sight. No paid subscriber referrals, no paid ads, and definitely no purchasing lists.

That makes growth hard and slow, at least in my experience, and I'm fine with that. It keeps me on my toes and helps me find new ways to grow my newsletter without paying for that growth. 🧪

Social Media as a Growth Channel

💡 Social media is a great way to grow your newsletter organically. However, you can be on all platforms at once, so you need to:

1. Find which platforms your audience is on and focus on those (rather than all of them).

2. Test, test, test.

3. Monitor your analytics and engagement (audiences change).

🧪 That last one is very important, as you can then build cool dashboards to help you make accurate decisions, more on that later.

I currently focus on three social media platforms for growing my newsletter:

• Twitter (X)

• Bluesky

• LinkedIn

After an initial bump, Bluesky has quickly died off, and most of my engagement there happens around SEO and WordPress or WooCommerce.

🚨 Twitter (X) used to be brilliant for me, but over the last two years, most of my email audience and peers have gone, and engagement has dropped off a cliff for my email-related posts (again, my posts about WordPress or WooCommerce thrive).

🎉 Then there’s LinkedIn, which did the exact opposite of Twitter (X). Now my email-related content performs best there, and my overall engagement across all social media platforms is best on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn for the Growth Win!

Let’s get the negatives out of the way first:

• LinkedIn is much maligned (and to an extent, rightly so, lots of AI slop).

• It's a closed platform (you can’t really see people's content without an account)

• Twitter-like “bros” have moved in (to an extent), and there are more hot-takes than the Hot Ones. 🌶️ 🥵

However, here’s the thing: for all the negatives, LinkedIn has an incredible email community!

✅ My strategy is not earth-shattering; it's simple, it works for me, and it could work for you (I use the free version of LinkedIn). It’s a weekly cycle of rinse and repeat:

1. I post every Monday morning before All About Email goes out that the next issue is coming soon, and include a subscribe link in the post (not the comments).

2. The post gets pinned to my “Featured Posts”, so it’s the first post someone sees on my profile.

3. After a couple of hours, I will "like" and “repost” the original post, like the self-indulgent algorithm-ignorer that I am. 🤣

4. If I’ve got any comments on the post, I will engage with those too.

5. When the newsletter is published, I remove my original post from the “Featured Posts” section and share a post with a link (again, in the post itself) and a nice, optimised description to gain attention.

6. 🚨 Everyone I feature in that newsletter then gets tagged in a comment to help increase reach and engagement.

7. After a couple of hours, I give myself some love and "Like” or “Celebrate” the post if I’m feeling particularly happy with myself. 🥳

8. A couple of hours later, the post gets "reposted” by me.

9. After my natural engagement window closes (yeah, I’m a geek and worked that out 🤓), which is 48 hours, I’ll make a LinkedIn post on Wednesday, sharing the Top 3 links from the newsletter, along with a link to the newsletter and the link sources tagged in a comment.

10. You guessed it, after a couple of hours, I “Like” the post and comment and a couple of hours after that, it gets reposted.

 💡 I am also active on LinkedIn regularly (apart from the weekends), building connections, engaging in industry-related conversations, and that has an impact, too.

Consistency and patience bring results.

My Newsletter Growth from LinkedIn

After two-ish years of doing this consistently, the results speak for themselves.👇

LinkedIn is my highest-quality channel. It makes up 25.3% of my total base but outperforms across every engagement metric:

• +8.9% higher engagement rate and a full 9.2 percentage points lower unsubscribe rate than the overall average. 🤯

• The in_profile source is the strongest driver. My LinkedIn profile link drives 68% of all LinkedIn subs (210/309) and has the lowest unsubscribe rate of any major channel at 24.2%, well below the overall average of 40.6%.

• The weak spot is linkedin[dot]android. Mobile LinkedIn referrals have the worst unsubscribe rate of any LinkedIn source (41.7%), slightly above the overall average, and a notably lower open rate (49.8% vs 65% for desktop LinkedIn).

• The embed: linkedin: social source, though small (12 subs), has an exceptional CTR of 30%. More than double the overall average.

🎉 All the LinkedIn sources combined make it my biggest newsletter growth driver, ahead of my own website (which is quite, not sure if that’s relevant), and in_profile stands as my number 2 growth channel on its own.

❤️ It’s hard not to love the type of subscribers LinkedIn is sending me:

• Large volume

• High engagement

• Lower churn

• Strong opens

🐝 If you would like to dig in a little bit more (it’s fascinating), I had Claude build a dashboard using the JSON data from Beehiiv.

💡 LinkedIn might not be the platform for you, {{first_name|friend}}. That’s fine, and takes us back to the point at the start of this email about finding the social media channel(s) that work for you and focusing on them.

But, whatever social media platform(s) you choose to focus on to grow your newsletter, the key is consistency; you’ve got to show up and invest the time.

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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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:

• 🎉 Announcing Preflight! - Preflight checks accessibility, rendering, and delivery before you send. (Preflight)

• Prove Your ROI - The Beginner's Guide To Using UTM Tracking in Newsletters. (Beehiiv)

• A Practical Example - SPF macros can silently break authentication in multi-ESP environments if order is not controlled. (Hagop Khatchoyan)

• NCSC DMARC Changes - Mail Check Alternatives for UK Organisations. (dmarcian)

• 20 Question Diagnostic - HubSpot CRM Health Assessment. (42 Agency)

• Values - We need more humanity in email, especially at unsubscribe. (MarTech)

• Expert Insights and Predictions - Email Deliverability Trends 2026. (Bouncer)

• Part Three - Data tables in email. (Sarah Gallardo)

• Trusted Platform Abuse Escalates - Scam Email Delivered via Xero Infrastructure Passes SPF, DKIM and DMARC. (Emailexpert)

• Inboxing Issues? - Ignore the LinkedInfluencer and review your strategy. (Alison Gootee)

• RGE Survey 2026 - Every answer helps the email industry see the real challenges you face, giving you the ammunition to advocate for better tools, support, and resources at work. (Really Good Emails)

• Google Forced Dark Mode - Some tips on how I like to try and work with it, without having to send lots of test emails. (Mark Robbins)

• RCS for Business is here - Branded, interactive messaging in the text inbox. (Klaviyo)

• Tried & Tested - Email Preview Text Examples. (Beehiiv)

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 #228 of All About Email!

Last week was about messaging (content) and how the wrong message can cause unnecessary headaches for your audience and even do some reputational damage.

This week, it’s about experimentation. 🧪

Let’s go! 👇

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Experimental Emails

You might not know this, but my newsletters are a constant experiment.

🤔 The question is, should your newsletters and email campaigns be too?

Sometimes I’m testing one thing in my emails, sometimes it’s more. Sometimes it’s hidden in the code or hidden in plain sight.

We all want our emails to perform better, subscriber habits change, and inboxes are changing faster than you can say 88mph 🏎️ 🔥 🕰️.

Our emails can’t stay static, and if you aren’t regularly testing and iterating, you are missing out on the best version of your email and doing a disservice to your subscribers.

Subscriber loyalty is so important; if your emails stagnate, don’t expect your audience to stick around.

Healthy Tension

💡 Email Experiments should “live in tension” between the needs of the email’s author(s) and the expectations/relationship with their audience.

• Experiments need to be intentional, not random.

• Experiments need to be measurable in some form.

Different brands, organisations, and people will have different goals for their email campaigns or newsletters (whatever we call them, though semantics matter 😉), but ultimately, experiments in your email marketing should improve your ROI or meet set goals (e.g., engagement, sales, conversions) without negatively impacting the relationship you have with your subscribers.

That’s why we have A/B testing, Multivariate testing, or just plain old singular experimentation and data analysis over time. 👇

An Example of a Singular Experiment

❓I started “Curiosity Corner” just over 5 months ago with the following purposes:

• Engagement - Clicks (good for deliverability and other such things).

• Understanding - Learning more about my audience.

• Better Content/Value - Creating content based on audience answers.

All of my subscribers see Curiosity Corner in both the email and the web version.

When Experiments Become Features or Not

Here’s the thing: the average poll received 11.5 responses, which accounted for only 1.92% of my audience.

🧠 Now, that’s not exactly a guiding light, but it does indicate a very engaged and loyal subset of my audience.

So I need to weigh up the cost of keeping the Curiosity Corner experiment against the benefits.

Unfortunately, the current Curiosity Corner format adds a bit of code weight (the joys of clipping) and takes more time than you might think to pull together, so:

• Curiosity Corner is taking a break (but it will be back).

• The format will be different (less code and maybe a sprinkling of automation).

• Asking better questions (I had a run of 4/5 weeks with a good volume of responses).

💡 Sometimes an experiment doesn’t work, and that’s OK… that’s the point, but sometimes the experiment needs to be modified and tried again.

Experiment Resources

🧑‍🔬 It’s time to get all sciencey (yes, I’m making “sciencey” a word). Experimentation requires resources.

Some of our ESPs and (more importantly, the plans we are on) give us more tools to experiment with than others, but in general, these are the human resources required:

• Thought - we need to be intentional about our experiments (you and your subscribers will benefit)

• Time - how long should an experiment run for? (Impacted by factors such as sending frequency, seasonal activity, etc.)

• Analysis - we need to be critical in our thinking and decision-making.

• Potential Iteration - If an experiment doesn’t end (either by removal or bybecoming a feature), it might need a tweak and be analysed again before a final decision is made.

Experiments To Try

You might be inspired, scratching your head or daunted by yet another thing to try in your campaigns and newsletters (if you aren’t already testing), so here are some examples to get you started:

• Not using Annotations for Promotions? - Try now and compare to your previous campaigns.

• Emails not being summarised correctly in the AI inbox? - Make sure your images have Alt and Title text, and you use a semantic HTML structure in your emails. (I’m looking at you in particular, Apple Mail!)

• Engagement lacking? - Add a regular poll, survey or quiz. (Just like Curiosity Corner 😉)

• Email Summaries - Give your subscribers (and the AI inbox) a defined overview of your email (see how engagement changes and whether the inboxes ignore your summary).

…And Remember

🚨 If you are going to experiment, make sure you can measure it as accurately as possible, whether that be in your ESPs data, a connected CRM, or an analytics integration; shots in the dark are useless and a waste of time.

And, don’t feel pressure to announce every experiment (although you might have to on occasion); some are subtle, and some experiments should be silent (you don’t want to bias your data).

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

Curiosity Corner

Welcome to Curiosity Corner! Each week, I throw one question your way…not always about email marketing, but always worth a reply.

Last week, I asked, ”Do Your Email Campaigns take a break”?

So far it’s a tie with 3 out of 8 votes (37.50%) 👇

🚨 This week, there is no question, and Curiosity Corner is taking a little break (I’ve already explained why 😉).

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.

The Hustle: Claude Hacks For Marketers

Some people use Claude to write emails. Others use it to basically run their entire business while they play Wordle.

This isn't just ChatGPT's cooler cousin. It's the AI that's quietly revolutionizing how smart people work – writing entire business plans, planning marketing campaigns, and basically becoming the intern you never have to pay.

The Hustle's new guide shows you exactly how the AI-literate are leaving everyone else behind. Subscribe for instant access.

Get our Claude playbook

Email Marketing News & Tips

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

• 🧠 Nobody Agreed - We Asked Email Deliverability Experts About Soft Bounce Handling. (Engagor)

• AI Inbox Insight - Your GAL Score™ Analysis. (emailexpert)

• Huge Potential - How to Run a Great Local Events Newsletter. (Inbox Collective)

• Migrating ESP? - 5 tips that will keep your warmup plan from dissolving like wet toilet paper in a hurricane. (LoriBeth Blair)

• Dormant, Not Dead - How to Revive Email Subscribers and Drive ROI. (Donna Morton - Zeta Global)

• Email in 2026 - Evolving Technical Requirements, Individualised Filtering, and AI Integration. (Laura Atikins)

• ❤️ I Love This - Do Not Disturb! (Kyle Adams)

• Carry On - How To Handle An Email Deliverability Crisis Calmly. (Bento)

• Relentless by Design - Des Brown on Ambition, Community, and Building in the Margins. (EmailBoutique & Des Brown)

• Support Needed - Urgent call for community support to secure Mautic’s financial future. (Mautic)

• 🤔 Do You Agree? - Email Welcome Flows Are Dead, and Orientation Flows Are In. (Beth O’Malley)

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 #227 of All About Email!

Last week, we revisited the Email Love Figma plugin, which is becoming an essential tool for many freelancers, agencies, and small teams.

This week, it’s about messaging (content) and how the wrong message can cause unnecessary headaches for your audience and even do some reputational damage.

Let’s go! 👇

Email Marketing Trends 2026

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Yahoo Got It Wrong (In My Opinion)

Even the big players get things wrong, and on February 3rd, 2026, a poorly worded email did just that.

I received the following email and promptly shared it on social media. It was shared on Twitter and Bluesky, and reactions were negative (as expected), but on LinkedIn, the situation escalated.

We need to take a look at the email first to see what the problem was. 👇

How Did Yahoo Get It Wrong?

🚨 First context. Yahoo doesn’t set it, and in light of a large reduction last year for US customers, many people thought their 20GB inboxes were being reduced again to 15GB.

😤 Users were not happy. Chad S. White, Alison Gootee, and many others shared my original post and wrote posts of their own based on it.

🫠 Across my LinkedIn post (mostly), shares, comments, and reposts, many people were confused, had questions, and expressed negative sentiment.

Not good for Yahoo, and my post got the attention of Marcel Becker (Senior Director Product Management), who said:

“Simon's reporting or framing is inaccurate.“

💡 However, my reporting and framing were accurate; the issue was the content of Yahoo’s email.

Marcel then proceeded to clarify the situation in some comments:

Could This Have Been Avoided?

👩‍🚒 Marcel added some other clarification points, which I included in my LinkedIn post; however, this confusion, negative sentiment, and firefighting could have been avoided.

The email simply needed to include “UK” or “United Kingdom” somewhere, and it would have been fine.

I’m not sure of the QA (review) process for email campaigns at Yahoo, but this should have been flagged.

How It Could Have Been Fixed?

✅ It wasn’t my responsibility (and I wasn’t required) to update my posts with further clarification or correction, but I did.

I wanted my reporting to be accurate, and for my audience to trust me.

We all make mistakes in our emails, but what do we do when we make them?

Do we own the mistake and try to fix it, or say nothing and move on?

Yahoo should have sent another email, in my opinion, maybe two:

• One for UK users, clarifying that the reduction in inbox storage was only for UK users.

• An email to all other regions clarifying that there was no further reduction to their services.

Mistakes In Content Are Opportunities

🫠 Our audiences often expect us to be perfect at all times, especially for big brands or highly respected individuals, but the fact is, we aren’t, and we never will be.

Nor will the email creation and review process.

🧠 Here’s the thing: when we make a mistake, confuse our audience, or let them down because of it, own it.

Acknowledging the mistake and making the correction can help restore trust, increase loyalty, and rebuild reputation.

🤷‍♂️ To Yahoo, this probably isn’t a big deal, but it’s a perfect example of why email content:

• Needs to be carefully planned and written.

• Needs to consider context, not just for the individual campaigns/segments but for any other campaigns/segments that could be impacted.

• Needs to be reviewed as part of the QA process before hitting send.

💡 We never know who will read our emails, and we can’t account for everyone.

Yes, we can segment and target, but audiences forward emails, screenshot and share emails, and read web versions, so we need to be as critical in our thinking and clear in our writing as possible.

🤭 And remember, don’t blame others for your mistakes.

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

Curiosity Corner

Welcome to Curiosity Corner! Each week, I throw one question your way…not always about email marketing, but always worth a reply.

Last week, I asked, ”Do You Struggle to Keep Up with new Email Tools?”

We have a tie, and whilst there weren’t many votes, the answer won’t surprise you. 👇

This week’s question is:

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

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Email Marketing News & Tips

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

• Why Replies? - How to Get More (and Better) Replies. (Growth Currency)

• Real Data You Can Follow - A Guide to Email Click-Through Rate Benchmarks. (Beehiiv)

• CAN-SPAM and PO Boxes - Clearing Up the Confusion. (Bento)

• Email Peeps 74 - Lee Munroe. (Email Love)

• Introducing GAL Score^TM - A free tool in open beta to give you visibility into how AI "sees" your campaigns before you send them. (EmailExpert)

• A New Focus? - Intuit Mailchimp Unlocks a New Era of Profitable Ecommerce Marketing with Advanced, Data-Driven Capabilities. (Business Wire)

• Part 2 - Data Tables in Email. (Sarah Gallardo)

• Keynote - The Future of Deliverability Recipient Rules. (Laura Atkins)

• Dreaming in Systems - Building Toward Freelance Independence - Megan Boshuyzen. (Email Boutique)

• Why It Breaks Email - The SPF 10 lookup limit problem. (Valimail)

• BIMI Alternatives - How to Get Your Logo to Show Next to Your Emails. (Bento)

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! 👋