The year was 1997. I had been married for a few months and had not been out of school for much longer. We had just moved from New Orleans to Austin, without jobs. So Carol and I spent many hours looking for work. One day, I returned to our modest apartment and checked my email. To my surprise, I had more than 70 emails, and only 3 of them were expected and wanted. That was the day that I decided that something had to give.
In 1997, I knew only a few things. One was that we would one day have some kids. Another was that I absolutely loved email as a medium for communication. Put those things together, and I desperately wanted to preserve email as a communication medium, not just for me, but for the kids I firmly believed would come to us one day. (Spoiler: Our three kids somehow all survived to adulthood.) If I was getting almost 70 unwanted, unrequested messages per day, email wouldn't be usable in 20 years, when they reached adulthood.
So, I taught myself how to read email headers and send actionable complaints. I had found a stick and was pretty good at swinging it. I was at least partially responsible for many spammers losing their accounts (sometimes several times). I got my first job working on an abuse desk enforcing policy.
One thing I learned over the next couple of years was that it wasn't enough to swing a stick. Businesspeople want to communicate with customers, and email is a great way to do it. Constantly beating people up about what not to do isn't sustainable. In the end, you only drive desperate people to take increasingly desperate measures. So, the question became how to use email ethically.
That question became a career. I started on abuse desks, helping enforce policies that protect users from spam. Over time, I moved into email deliverability consulting, helping companies get the right message to the right person at the right time.
This post was part of Deliverability Week 2024. Other contributors that week:
Al Iverson, Deliverability Matters, and Welcome to Deliverability Week 2024!, Spam Resource (2024), https://www.spamresource.com/2024/06/deliverability-matters-and-welcome-to.html.
Richello Killian, Why Deliverability Matters to Me, InboxJam (2024), https://www.inboxjam.com/2024/06/17/why-deliverability-matters-to-me/; Richello Killian, What Is Deliverability, And Why Does It Matter?, InboxJam (2024), https://www.inboxjam.com/2024/06/17/what-is-deliverability-and-why-does-it-matter/.
Steve Atkins, It's Deliverability Week, Word to the Wise (2024), https://wordtothewise.com/2024/06/deliverability-week-2024/.
Laura Atkins, Why Deliverability Matters to Me, Word to the Wise (2024), https://wordtothewise.com/2024/06/why-deliverability-matters-to-me/.
Matthew Vernhout, Deliverability: Why It Matters to Me and You, EmailKarma.net (2024), https://emailkarma.net/2024/06/deliverability-why-it-matters-to-me-and-you/.
Sella Yoffe, Deliverability Week 2024, CRM.BUZZ (2024), https://crm.buzz/en/deliverability-week-2024/.
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