To help a friend

In late 2020, a friend of mine was facing severe email deliverability issues. This situation was obstructing the conversion of new sign-ups into active accounts, threatening significant financial impact. At the time, they were running multiple marketing campaigns that successfully generated sign-ups. However, users were unable to verify their accounts, impeding their ability to receive notifications on the platform. Knowing my background managing the deliverability team at Campaign Monitor for several years, my friend approached me for help. After gaining access to their transactional email platform, I quickly pinpointed several straightforward issues that were exacerbating the problem.

Initially, I noticed that SPF and DKIM were not set up correctly. Their link domain was utilizing the email provider's subdomain feature, which was unsecured. Moreover, they were bundling welcome, password reset, and critical notification emails all into one batch. Different types of emails have distinct deliverability characteristics, and this misalignment was magnifying the issue.

Sign-up emails generally have a high bounce rate due to fraudulent sign-ups from marketing campaigns. Mixing these with their primary email messaging notifications hindered the progress of accounts through verification stages. Essentially, this mix-up was stalling the progression of these accounts into an active state.

I immediately set to work rectifying the configuration issues. I migrated their sending volume to a different subdomain of the main marketing domain and ensured all link domains were secure. Some of these fixes could be applied directly within the email provider platform, while others required external solutions.

After these steps, I checked in with my friend. I expressed my thoughts about the recurring nature of deliverability issues that not only my friend but others in their networks also experienced. I felt there had to be a better way. This was not the first time a friend or acquaintance had approached me about deliverability issues in their startup or established business.

So, I decided to build a platform to solve this problem. It turned out to be a more labor-intensive project than I had initially anticipated, but over the course of a year or so, I got there. I teamed up with a few friends to create a platform that catered to the needs of various customers. Some of them were sending a small volume of emails, while others were dispatching a much larger amount. Based on their feedback, we refined the platform, and thus SMTPD was born.