With 2022’s Black Friday and Cyber Monday behind us, and two more weeks left in December, let’s look at what we can see of Holiday-related retail email thus far, and share key insights and email best practices for successfully supporting Holiday.

AMP for Email helps companies optimize their emails with interactive elements that deliver a unique and engaging user experience. If you’re interested in using AMP marketing in your email strategy, it’s essential to know the functions, benefits, limitations, and stipulations regarding AMP emails.

Integrating with a cloud email API is the most performant approach for implementing notifications and other transactional emails.

People configuring an app or mail system to send (or relay) email often have a common question: “What SMTP port should I use?” You might see information that tells you to use ports 25, 465, 587, or 2525 for SMTP relay.

This post is part of a series on optimizing customer support operations. In it, we explain how to divert incoming requests to lower-cost channels to reduce customer service costs.

This post is part of a series on optimizing customer support operations. In it, we cover how to prioritize your most important customers.

Today at MessageBird we’re celebrating Women’s Equality Day – in commemoration of the 19th Amendment to the United States Constitution. The 19th amendment was adopted in 1920, giving women the right to vote. More than a century later women’s suffrage is still not a worldwide right!

To celebrate Pride Month here at MessageBird, we started the month asking Birds who are members of the LGBTIQ+ community and community allies to share what Pride means to them.

Let’s dive into the weird and wonderful world of email, and uncover some interesting and fun email facts – and maybe you’ll discover some you didn’t know or re-read some that are on every blog post on this topic. Facts are limited after all.

DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail) is a common email authentication method designed to reduce the opportunities for phishing attacks and email spam. Combined with other common authentication mechanisms, the chances that your sending domains are compromised to perform attacks successfully is greatly reduced.

Video banking is when customers talk to their bank from home, using their laptop, tablet or smartphone. It uses live video technology to connect a customer with a financial advisor or banker.

The acceleration of growth leads to an exciting uptick in customers, but it also means an inevitable overload of customer support inquiries.

The recent changes with Apple Mail Privacy Protection had us wondering – where else is prefetching happening? While false opens come as no huge surprise, we have additional details around the limited set of circumstances in which Gmail is prefetching images in emails sent to Gmail users.

Of the 7.7 billion people on the planet, it’s estimated that about 3.5 billion of them have Internet access, and over half of them use email. That’s pretty impressive.

Financial institutions across the European Economic Area (EEA) are getting ready for PSD2 to come into full effect. Read more to see how your company can prepare itself.

Business on Instagram is booming — the social platform now has over one billion active monthly users, 500 million daily Stories users and 150 million people on Instagram have a conversation with a business every month.

MessageBird offers many direct integrations that allow you to plug your communications into the tools and platforms already used in your business. Using Flow Builder's native integrations, custom connections via HTTP requests and webhooks, you can easily enrich customer profiles, enable rapid sales engagement and drive more qualified leads.

We recently launched our Omnichannel Widget, which combines Live Chat messaging with MessageBird's omnichannel capabilities.

Co-browsing is short for 'collaborating browsing' - simultaneously navigating the same web page with your customer. We all know the frustration of having to try to explain in words where to click on a web page, or how to fill out a form correctly…

Today’s industry standards and regulations require your business to establish more secure authentication mechanisms that prevent fraud and protect user accounts.

OLX Indonesia identified that many of their sellers were using WhatsApp on their personal devices, so in partnership with MessageBird, decided to trial sending package reports through the app.

There’s no doubt the iOS 15 Mail Privacy Protection changes are significant and will have a direct impact on how marketers track the success of their email programs. When faced with such a drastic and sudden change, it’s only natural to try and seek out ways that will keep or rationalize the status quo.  

Google recently released a brand new way to engage with your customers — even before they make it to your website. It’s called Google’s Business Messages. We’re excited to be one of a few Google partners that can get you started today.

When it comes to authentication, passwords alone aren’t enough to keep your business and customers secure.

This is a command line tool that can send emails via SMTP. It’s not only easy to use but also simultaneously provides a myriad of options when needed.

If you’re an #emailgeek, you’ve no doubt heard the news from Apple this week on a big change that will have an impact on email when it comes to open tracking. We wanted to share what we know and our points of view as of now, but this information will evolve as we learn more. We’ll be sure to continue updating this post and sharing new content in the coming weeks and months as we learn more.

Firebase allows you to quickly develop and deploy high-quality apps, paired with extended functionalities that enable you to continuously optimize and scale your app. Firebase also hosts pre-packaged, open-source extensions to help you automate common development tasks.

A passion for sharing authentic Mexican flavor

NUJEK was on the lookout for a communications platform that allowed them to reach its customers on their preferred channels and bring automation to its courier and partner communications.

When there’s an incident — a misconfiguration, a server down, or any technical problem that may cause issues — the right team or individual needs to know as soon as possible.

I am thrilled to share with you that SparkPost has signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by MessageBird, the world’s leading omnichannel cloud communications platform.

We’re excited to announce MessageBird’s intention to acquire SparkPost, the world’s most trusted email sending and deliverability platform. It’s used to send over 4.5 trillion emails every year.

With MessageBird’s Flow Builder, you can automatically know if a WhatsApp message was delivered, and use SMS or Voice as a fallback option to ensure you reach your client.

Aramex ANZ is a leading logistics provider serving the Australia and New Zealand regions. “We offer a cost-effective, reliable, timetabled courier service,” said Ruby Wolff, COO of Aramex ANZ. “Backed up by the latest innovative technology and real-time track and trace facilities, Aramex Australia & New Zealand is the ideal choice for businesses of all sizes, domestic and international.”

Due to the digital transformation required by Covid-19, many entrepreneurs and small businesses have been forced to switch to off-site and online sales – and that’s a tough challenge.

TicketSwap was nearing peak festival season and needed an email solution that could reach millions of e-ticket buyers and sellers without getting blocked or lost in spam folders.

WhatsApp Message Templates allow you to actively communicate and build engaging experiences with your customers. You can send templated support messages, notifications, account updates, alerts, and two-factor authentication codes.

When sending a marketing campaign, for example, you need to know how much the messages cost in order to know the ROI of the campaign.

By combining Google’s Business Messages with MessageBird’s omnichannel platform, your business can seamlessly unify all of your communication channels, no matter how many, and create a consistent messaging experience that delights. 

Localization is an essential process for expanding a business into new markets and tailoring products and services to customers with various linguistic and cultural backgrounds.

Today, customers expect human support in real time. That’s why 79% of consumers prefer Live Chat over the legacy support channels like phone calls.

Flow Builder is a powerful drag-and-drop automation engine for creating communication flows. We initially conceived it as a no-code solution, but we found many users could get really powerful behavior writing some code for specific use-cases. These bits of code can be inside Flow Builder, or they can be 3rd party cloud functions like AWS Lambda functions or Google Cloud Functions.

Marketing automation platforms (e.g. Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Marketo, etc.) are great at sending 1 time emails or messages to individuals, at scale. But, how can you drive more conversational engagements with your customers?

In March we released Inbox, our free, omnichannel customer support tool for businesses of all sizes. Since then we’ve been continuously talking to users, adding new enhancements, and thinking about what business communication means in a world that became suddenly remote-first.

SparkPost Recipient Validation is now available both for existing SparkPost customers and for new, non-sending customers. It uses powerful data-driven analysis on billions of bounce, delivery, and engagement events daily to train our algorithm, bringing you one of the most powerful data-driven email validation tools on the market, so you can send emails smarter.

CUSTOMIZE Are you using TLS older than 1.2? It’s ok, maintenance update delays happen to everyone. We get it. However, it is time to move on.

It’s hard to believe we’ve already been working from home for seven weeks. When the Dutch government first announced on March 12, 2020, that everyone should stay home if possible, we immediately jumped into action.

People configuring an app or mail system to send (or relay) email often have a common question: “What SMTP port should I use?”

Customers often ask “what are the best configurations to use with PowerMTA”? The answer is different for every region of the world. Configuration settings in the US will be vastly different than those in Europe for example, so global settings are not as effective. In this blog post, we take a look at five essential PowerMTA™ configuration tips that will help make your sending infrastructure more efficient and reduce I/O clutter.

As people, organizations, and communities around the world work together to navigate the COVID-19 crisis, we at MessageBird understand that access to reliable remote communication is more important than ever.

MessageBird works with retailers like Hugo Boss and Rituals to integrate intelligent communications into their shopping experiences that drive faster sales and build long-term brand loyalty.

Today’s customers don’t want to wait on hold, they want to talk to businesses on their terms, on their own timelines. With 86% of consumers willing to pay more for better customer experience, being accessible on their preferred communication channels has never been more important.

Streamline your customer service and customer support setups with MessageBird's conversations API and WhatsApp

We know. Breaking up is hard to do. You put a lot of effort into gaining every subscriber to your list. But when push comes to shove, your subscribers need to have the final say in whether they stay subscribed to your mailings or not. Unsubscribes do NOT negatively affect your mailing reputation but clicks on the SPAM button do. That’s what subscribers do when they can’t easily find a way to unsubscribe from your mailings.

In the world of email, there are many facets to testing, but one of the most basic tests you can do is to simply telnet into a given SMTP server. This SMTP check is useful in determining if the most basic of problems do or do not exist.

MessageBird recently launched Programmable Conversations. It lets companies blend communications platforms like WhatsApp, Messenger and SMS into their systems — using a single API.

This post is part of a series on optimizing customer support operations. In it, we cover how to create a better experience for your customers when they end up in a queue.

Marketing teams usually rely on online analytics tools to help them determine anything from how effectively their company website is converting leads to how well an online campaign just performed. But what if you’re a smaller company or an entrepreneur, and your leads mostly come in through phone calls? What’s the best way to analyze your marketing efforts to figure out which campaigns are generating the most inbound leads?

Businesses might fall under the mistaken assumption that once their customer has completed an order, the job is pretty much done.

To deliver convenient, competitive experiences, businesses have to meet customers on their terms, on their turf. But until recently, this was easier said than done.

Everyone uses email. Even in our increasingly on-demand world, where it seems like there’s a communications channel for every preference, email is still the standard-bearer.

Earlier this week, Tripolis connected with MessageBird to learn more about omnichannel strategies for marketing professionals. Read on for the interview.

Modern business is built on customer feedback. You need data to create better customer experiences, or even just to provide your service. The problem many businesses run into is that nobody enjoys filling out a form.

With a VMN, a musician can create a direct point of contact with their fans. Some well-known artists like Questlove from The Roots, and YouTuber/singer-songwriter, Tessa Violet, have published their numbers online, enabling fans to text them.

The rise of online shopping giants like Amazon has changed just about everything about how people make purchases. But you might be surprised to learn that more people still buy in-store than online.

For TicketSwap, providing quick, reliable communications around transactions and ensuring that its users are legitimate is critical to delivering secure, transparent resale experiences.

You’ve heard about the mega-successful on-demand companies like Instacart or Lyft. And, you may be aware of the innovative tech tools and CPaaS solutions that drive every aspect of their businesses.

Customer experience impacts sales. Buyers with great past experiences spend 140% more compared to those with poor experiences. And in today’s connected world, that experience is directly linked to customer service.

Communication is the single most important pillar of any on-demand platform, and SMS has the power to connect buyers and suppliers to your service faster and more reliably.

If you are anything like other businesses, chances are high you see a clear pattern in the type of incoming support questions. But at times, the answer to those questions can turn out to be repetitive as well.

In this part, we’ll look at how the tool can be adapted to inject mail streams into on-premises platforms such as PowerMTA and Momentum.

Email may be the oldest form of digital communication, but it’s currently used by over half of the people in the world, with the population of email users expected to reach more than 4.3 billion by the end of 2023.

From regular expression conformity to today’s sophisticated tools, email validation has gone through a few different eras. Before looking at the history of validation techniques and best practices, it’s essential to understand the basics.

One wrong character in an email address can create a bounce-back, or it can put your message in the wrong person’s inbox, which can lead to them clicking the unsubscribe link, filing a spam complaint, or simply never opening the email. All of those results negatively impact your sender reputation, which harms your ability to get emails into your customers’ inboxes.

Let’s dive into the details of setting up PowerMTA for SparkPost Signals.

Simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) is an approach to sending and receiving emails that helps email servers — the computers used for email operations — decode and understand your email requests.

Now, with the arrival of AI-related technologies, your email campaigns can become even more precise, engaging, and effective than they’ve ever been.

Like the cloud several years ago, cryptocurrency is the new tech buzzword that’s generated a lot of chatter while leaving many wondering if it’s much ado about nothing.

Are you brand new to sending mass emails and not sure where to start? Unfortunately, sending mass emails is actually a pretty complicated science.

As fintech provider Stripe explains, welcome emails are important. So important, in fact, that they can drive three times the transaction and revenue per email than other promotional emails. That’s a substantial chunk of future revenue, so maximizing onboarding is vital.

Like many industries, insurance has moved away from face-to-face interactions and has become a business where many transactions are handled online. However, email remains a key channel for activity, as evidenced by email marketing’s strong ROI.

Financial technology providers are right at the forefront of finding relevant ways to deploy transactional and triggered email. That only makes sense, since they’re in constant search of new growth surfaces.

An email seed list is a list of test email addresses created for the purpose of monitoring where messages will land when sent. These lists usually contain test addresses at major providers such as Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, Orange.fr and many other ISP domains.

In this blog, I will describe the process I went through to store the body of the email onto S3 (Amazon’s Simple Store Service) and ancillary data into a MySQL table for easy cross-referencing.

Somewhere along the way Cupid stopped shooting arrows and started sending emails. It’s hard to say exactly when this shift happened but I’d guess it was sometime around 1995 when Match.com was first launched.

With the increase of email usage in regulatory environments, I have decided it is time to start a new project that pulls all of this together with code samples on how to store the email body and all of its associated data.

In this series, we’ve seen how including an S/MIME signature is fairly straightforward. Sending S/MIME encrypted mail is more complex because you need to obtain recipient public keys. It’s one thing when you’re using a mail client for humans such as Thunderbird – but how can that work with app-generated email streams?

In part 1, we had a quick tour of S/MIME, looking at signing and encryption of our message streams across a range of mail clients. S/MIME messages can be signed (giving proof of sender’s identity), encrypted (keeping the message body secret), or both.

S/MIME is a long-established method of sending encrypted, signed email, based on public Internet standards. We regularly come across requirements for S/MIME, particularly from regulated industries such as banking, health, and finance.

Make the most of your SMS marketing with these best practices.

Creating savings accounts, depositing checks, and getting business loans aren’t the kind of exciting activities that most people look forward to, but these emails demonstrate some ingenious ways to get people’s attention and prompt them to interact with a financial services business.

Banks tend to play it safe when it comes to adopting new technology to communicate with their customers. When you consider the sensitivity of their data it’s no surprise that financial institutions are cautious when introducing new communication channels to their customers.

When talking about file sizes in email, we’re really talking about 3 topics: the size of the HTML file sent, the size of external assets, and the fully loaded size. We want to keep all of these file sizes as small as possible, but what are the maximum sizes and what should we aim for?

While the US and UK share the same language, the way in which it is used in email marketing in the two countries is quite different! Because of this, when targeting both American and British customers it’s important to consider both the obvious and nuanced cultural differences between the countries exhibited in their varying email strategies.

Email notifications are an integral part of SaaS product strategy and development. They convey essential information, drive app activity and visits, and nurture user relationships.

If you’re aware of how email can play a critical role in acquiring and retaining customers, then you’ve probably heard of SPF and DKIM.

A transactional email is a method of customer communication in which automated, real-time messages are sent to users through email after a specific action has been performed within an application or website.

Several of our enterprise customers have recently gone through either a rebranding or an acquisition where they’ve needed to fold a new mailing list from the acquired company into their own. Because of this, I’ve recently been asked how to best go about doing that and decided to document some thoughts here.

Email notifications are powerful drivers of user engagement with SaaS apps. But not all of these messages are created equal. The best alerts convey key information and make interaction feel almost effortless.

The top 15 email deliverability best practices you should follow in order to avoid issues to begin with when sending to Gmail.

Every email marketer would love to know the special sauce that gets their messages directly into the intended recipient’s inbox. However, most marketers, especially those who’ve been doing it for a while, know just how complicated and tricky that task can be.

The average person receives a lot of emails every day. The Radicati Group said in a February 2017 report that it expects 269 billion business and consumer emails to be sent and received per day in 2017, with 3.7 billion email users worldwide.

In November, I gave a talk at Live! 360 on how to create a basic webhook consumer using Azure Functions. This blog post will recap that talk and distill things so that you will understand the basics of Azure Functions,

Everyone using technology today (and that is everyone) faces a wide range of security challenges. Devices can be lost or stolen. Accounts can be hacked. Personal information can be leaked online.

So you’re looking to boost your email game, get your hands dirty and stay in the running to be the world’s best email sender — or something like that. This post will give you a practical understanding of email headers, their importance, how to access them and how to read them.

Sending email is a very common need for C# applications. Think about some of the use cases almost every app needs to handle: new user welcomes, event notifications, password resets, and so on. These transactional emails are workhorses, and it’s really important that they get to your users. As a C# developer, what’s the best way to get them done?

As a Developer Advocate for SparkPost, I write a lot of sample applications. My background is mostly front-end development, therefore my strongest language is JavaScript. Thanks to Node.js, I’m a decent backend developer as well. Does this mean I’m a full stack developer now?

People often ask me what makes a good security program. As much as I would like to point to one aspect of my security perimeter to use as an example, there are multiple items to highlight.

One of my favorite features is the emoji shortcut, which allows you to simply type :emoji-name: to insert the corresponding emoji. It makes it really easy to add emotion without hunting for the particular emoji you’re thinking of.

So how hard can it be to version an API? The truth is it’s not, but what is hard is maintaining some sanity by not needlessly devolving into a dizzying number of versions and subversions applied across dozens of API endpoints with unclear compatibilities.

At SparkPost, we put a lot of time and effort into testing our code. Our platform is written in C, and recently I researched integrating with a unit testing framework called “CppUTest”, which provides xUnit-style testing for C/C++. This framework is robust, feature-rich, and under active development, which makes it a great choice. It also provides a C integration layer which made it easy to use with our platform C code even though most of the framework is C++. This tutorial covers how to get started with CppUTest on your own projects.

CUSTOMIZE When we speak of “Email Authentication”, we’re referring to a technique that provides to the recipient of a message some level of certainty that the message actually originated with the claimed source of the message.

We ran into undocumented practical limits of the EC2 instances we were using for our primary DNS cluster. Sizing cloud i