Half-Year Review: Email in the AI Inbox Era
Six months that rearranged the reading layer: Gemini in Gmail, Microsoft rejecting outright, DMARC finally a standard. What the first half of 2026 means for senders.
Articles and tutorials on communication infrastructure.
1–12 of 61 articles
Six months that rearranged the reading layer: Gemini in Gmail, Microsoft rejecting outright, DMARC finally a standard. What the first half of 2026 means for senders.
The incident is over, placement recovered, and the pressure to move on is enormous. The blameless postmortem practice that converts each incident into prevention.
Five months of AI Overviews data shows opens up and clicks down: recipients read summaries. How to structure email so the model's version still does your job.
When spammers forge your domain as their envelope sender, the bounces come to you. What backscatter is, why it happens, and how to stop causing and receiving it.
After eleven years, DMARC is a real standard: RFC 9989, 9990, and 9991 replace RFC 7489. What is different, what stays, and the short list of actions for senders.
The big three score senders differently, expose different data, and fail in different ways. One operating playbook per provider beats one averaged strategy.
user+anything@gmail.com is one mailbox wearing labels. How subaddressing works, why blocking it backfires, and what plus addresses reveal about your data flows.
Every email trust decision resolves through DNS, and DNSSEC is what makes those answers tamper-proof. What it buys email, what DANE requires, and safe operations.
For OTPs and password resets, seconds are the metric. Where latency hides in the sending path, how to measure time-to-inbox honestly, and what budgets to hold.
A preference center offers frequency and topic choices to people about to leave. Where it genuinely saves subscribers, where it violates one-click rules, and the design that works.
A rebrand replaces the one asset deliverability cannot: your domain's history. The parallel-running plan that carries trust from the old name to the new one.
Security gateways click every link in every email before humans see them. How scanner traffic pollutes click metrics, breaks one-click flows, and how to filter it.