The Deliverable Diary

A transactional email is an automated message triggered by something a specific person did, or something that happened to their account, and it carries information they’re expecting or that they need to complete an action. Receipts. Password resets. Shipping updates. Two-factor codes. The definition is the easy part. The interesting part is the line that […]

Most email attachment size guides give you a number and call it done. The problem is that the number on the box isn’t the number that actually sends. Encoding adds weight, recipient servers have their own caps, and a 24 MB file can bounce off a 25 MB limit without ever reaching an inbox. This […]

Transactional SMS is the text your customer gets the second something happens on their account. The shipping label is printed. The login attempt fires. The appointment is 30 minutes out. It’s automated, it’s triggered by an event, and it carries information the recipient actually wants. Marketing? That’s a separate animal with separate rules. This guide […]

You’re scaling from a few thousand emails a day to fifty or a hundred thousand. Maybe more. You have a list, you have a sender domain, and you’d like the mail to actually reach inboxes. Here’s the version your future self wants you to have read before launching. Start at 500 to 1,000 emails on […]

There’s a common belief in marketing that if you tell a great story, people will naturally buy. It sounds nice. It feels right. But in practice, it’s only half true. Storytelling captures attention. Storyselling drives action. If your emails are getting opens but not conversions, the gap between those two ideas is probably where things […]

DMARC is a small text record you publish in your domain’s DNS that tells receiving mail servers what to do if a message claiming to be from your domain fails SPF or DKIM checks. It does three things: it authenticates your outbound mail, it tells receivers how to handle failures (ignore, junk, or reject), and […]