Blog
Notes from the
honest side of email
Deliverability, honest analytics and outreach craft — written in plain language, with no growth-hack snake oil.
Earlier articles
253 articles
ProspectingAnalysis7 min
Your prospect list might already be sitting in a hacker's leak site
ShinyHunters published a corpus of business contacts stolen from Fluke Corporation's CRM. What that means for cold email lists that overlap with breach data.
DeliverabilityAnalysis9 min
Gmail, Outlook and Yahoo don't police bulk senders the same way in 2026
All three require SPF, DKIM and DMARC — but the tools they give senders to see their own reputation, and what those tools actually show, are three different systems.
StrategyAnalysis5 min
The day Gmail split your inbox into tabs, and what marketers got wrong
Gmail's May 2013 Primary/Social/Promotions split triggered real panic. Here's what the data actually showed, and what senders had to relearn.
ProspectingAnalysis7 min
A sales tool's breach exposed pricing, contacts, and deal notes at dozens of companies
A supply-chain breach at sales-intelligence tool Klue exposed business contacts, pricing quotes, and deal notes across roughly 200 companies' CRMs.
DeliverabilityField note6 min
A password manager just got impersonated by a domain one letter off
LastPass warned customers about phishing sent from lookalike domains it never owned — a reminder that DMARC doesn't stop a domain that merely resembles yours.
DeveloperAnalysis6 min
MCP is a real cross-vendor standard now. Here's what that should change about how you evaluate it
Google, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, and ServiceNow all shipped native MCP support in 2026 — what to check before connecting an agent to your data through it.
DeliverabilityAnalysis8 min
Microsoft joined the bulk-sender rules in 2025 — and skipped straight to rejection
Google and Yahoo phased in bulk-sender enforcement gradually from 2024. Microsoft's 2025 rules skip straight to hard SMTP rejection — here's the real difference.
Developer10 min
Moving your contact spreadsheet into Norbelys without losing data
The real steps for migrating a spreadsheet of contacts into Norbelys: mapping fields, deduplication, verification, and what happens to the rows that don't survive.
ProspectingField note6 min
Your inbox isn't actually busiest on Monday. It just feels that way
Monday morning feels like the most crowded inbox of the week. The data says something more specific — and it changes when you should actually hit send.
CopywritingAnalysis5 min
The line between AI personalization and AI impersonation just got official
The FTC's 2026 policy statement on deceptive AI and LinkedIn's crackdown draw the same line: AI is fine, fabricated claims aren't. Cold email sits on that line.
DeveloperAnalysis6 min
Prompt injection in 2026: from theoretical warning to documented exploit class
OWASP ranks prompt injection the #1 LLM risk. 2026 gave it a paper trail: Unit 42's documented cases and a flaw in Microsoft's Azure DevOps MCP server prove it.
ComplianceAnalysis6 min
Deleting the data is cheap. Proving you deleted it isn't.
Gartner puts the cost of a manual deletion request at $1,524 — almost entirely documentation, not deletion. The audit trail is compliance's under-budgeted half.