Library

Longer pieces, with the workings left in.

Every piece names its sources. Where we relied on somebody else's estimate, we say it is an estimate.

Oct 1, 2026
I read the SPF records of 52 SaaS companies. Their lifecycle marketing leaves through three platforms, at the median.

A lifecycle diagram shows one journey in one tool. The DNS of the same company shows the welcome, the receipt, the support reply and the survey leaving from different systems that do not share an unsubscribe list.

Lifecycle
5 min
Sep 19, 2026
Three of thirty companies tell the internet to encrypt their mail. On one of the three, the instruction cannot be read.

SPF, DKIM and DMARC answer who sent the message. None of them says the connection has to be encrypted. I went to see who bothers with the record that does.

Transport security
5 min
Aug 21, 2026
All thirty domains I checked enforce DMARC. Seventeen of them sit on an SPF record that fails soft.

The industry finished the DMARC argument and moved on. What it left behind is a layer of SPF records that were written for a softer world, and one of them belongs to a company that sends a great deal of mail.

Authentication
8 min
Aug 16, 2026
Zendesk's SPF record has one entry. A receiver counts six.

Canva sits at nine of a possible ten, and I only know because I wrote a counter that follows the chain the way a receiving server does rather than the way a person reads it.

Authentication
4 min
Aug 16, 2026
I checked seventeen domains for deliverability. Only two were broken.

I expected a mess and did not find one. The interesting results were the two domains that were not clean, and neither failure is the one you would guess.

Deliverability
4 min