AL IVERSON

Hi. I’m Al Iverson. I solve email problems.

I know email marketing best practices, deliverability, and email authentication. I know what to do with acronyms like SPF, DKIM, DMARC and BIMI. I help people maximize deliverability success (and inbox placement) using email platforms big and small — from Mailchimp, to Klaviyo, to Braze, Sendgrid, Mailgun, Amazon SES, and all those different marketing clouds.

I am currently Industry Research and Community Engagement Lead for DMARC provider Valimail. And prior to that, I was Director of Deliverability for ExactTarget, later known as Salesforce Marketing Cloud, for fifteen years.

I have been around long enough to have been mentioned in passing in Wikipedia’s History of email spam entry. I am indeed the ‘Al Iverson of Radparker’ who created one of the early anti-spam blocklists in an attempt to help folks block unwanted spam from open relaying mail servers.

From those beginnings, my role steadily changed, evolving from 'spam cop' to grow into the person you can call on to teach you how to do email the right way. These days I spend my time helping legitimate senders understand how mailbox providers think, how filters really work, and how to build reputation and reliably earn trust over time.

View my CV on Linkedin

I’ve been publishing the blog Spam Resource since 2001. My goal? To share email and deliverability tips and tricks, guide readers on email marketing best practices, and help people understand technologies relating to the sending and receiving of email.

There's a whole section called DELIVTERMS, focused on explaining email-related (and especially deliverability-related) terminology and acronyms.

I also try to report on issues around mailbox providers going offline (temporarily or permanently), and provide details on how to deal with ever evolving email sender requirements put forth by mailbox providers. Email authentication, too, is a big part of what I cover, as technologies like SPF, DKIM and DMARC are essential to successful email delivery in this modern age.

Spam Resource has received more than five million page views.

Jazz is a uniquely American art form that is truly important to me and makes my life better. When I’m not geeking out about email technology, deliverability, and data, you’ll find me listening to old jazz records or going to see a live show here in Chicago at Andy’s, Green Mill, or Jazz Showcase. And I always keep an eye out to see where and when Sabertooth is playing next.

Jazz and email are even a bit intertwined in my history. My first hands-on experience with email marketing was in 1999, when I built the website for a friend’s jazz club, the Artists’ Quarter, located in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Along with building tools to manage the overall website and calendar of events, I created my own mailing list manager and double opt-in email signup tool, growing the club’s email list from zero to more than five thousand subscribers during my time with them. Our weekly emails ended up replacing the club’s monthly paper mailings, saving money on printing and postage, and allowing us to be nimble and responsive to circumstance with last minute lineup changes or discounts.

And if I ever wanted to be reminded of how widely read the emails were, all I had to do was list a given show’s cover charge at a too-low price, and multiple people coming in for that show would reference the wrong, lower price. Few things grab subscriber attention better than a money-saving typo.

Alas, the Artists’ Quarter jazz club is no more, but my love for both email and jazz live on.

Other things I’ve created or published include:

Wombatmail, which combines a set of DNS tools and mailbox provider data that I put together to help fellow email and deliverability nerds troubleshoot problems. It first launched in 2008 (as XNND).

I’ve also published Blocklist Resource since 2001 to help catalog most of the different spam filtering blocklists. Since then, the world of spam filtering has mostly moved on. In this modern era of deliverability, most blocklists don’t generally cause deliverability issues, with the exception of Spamhaus and a few others. In fact, 30+ blocklists have come and gone over the years, making this site a bit of a blocklist graveyard by this point.

I also have a personal blog called Bacon Rodeo that used to get enough traffic, many years ago, that I would make thirty to forty bucks a month in ad revenue. Those days are long gone, and I don’t really know why I even keep the blog alive, still. But it is, and you can find it here.

I’d love to hear from you, but please don’t try to sell me something. Don’t add me to your outreach list, newsletter, or email marketing database, and no, I don’t take unsolicited guest post submissions for my blog.

But, I am happy to answer email deliverability questions as time permits! So do feel free to reach out to ask a question or just to say hi.