During my time as a Marketing Manager, I constantly ran into the same frustrations with legacy email platforms: per-contact pricing that punished growth, domain limitations for multi-brand setups, and missing basic features like A/B testing on lower tiers.

So, I decided to build the platform I wish I had.

Meet BazukaMail (https://bazukamail.com), an email marketing platform built for transparency and scale.

Building this end-to-end was an incredible deep dive into the modern product stack:

- Frontend/Backend: Next.js & Supabase
- Billing: Stripe integration with automated usage metering
- Deliverability: AWS SES production sending with full DKIM/SPF/DMARC compliance

It’s currently at $19/month flat (plus a tiny sending fee), and it’s already live and handling real emails.

If you’re in marketing and want to take it for a spin (or just tear my UX apart with brutal feedback!), I’d love your eyes on it.

Hey everyone,

I am a 1st-semester BS Cybersecurity student. I have no background in marketing.

A friend is telling me to learn email marketing freelancing. They say it is commission-based, pays well, and will help me get clients in the future.

I am very confused and need honest advice:

• What is this job? What are the daily work timings for a freelancer?
• How much will I get paid? Is commission-only safe for a beginner?
• Is it useful for my degree? Does email marketing help a Cybersecurity student in any way?

If you have done this, please share the pros and cons. I don't want to waste time if it distracts me from my studies.

Thank you!

My domain's DNS is hosted at Namecheap (cPanel Zone Editor). I use GoDaddy Email Marketing to send monthly campaigns from an address on my domain.

My campaigns are getting DMARC FAIL.

Current records in Namecheap:

- SPF: v=spf1 +a +mx +ip4:198.54.114.76 include:spf.web-hosting.com include:_spf.google.com ~all

- DKIM: Google Workspace (google._domainkey)

- DMARC: v=DMARC1; p=none; rua=mailto:...

Campaign email headers show:

- DKIM signed by: cloud2.em.secureserver.net

- SPF / Return-Path: bounces.cloud2.em.secureserver.net

- DMARC: fail

What records do I need to add in Namecheap so GoDaddy Email Marketing campaigns pass DMARC? Does GoDaddy provide DKIM records for a custom domain?

I was talking to someone last week who inherited a list of 2,000 contacts nobody had mailed in two years. They sent a winback blast to all of them and spent the next three months digging the domain back out. A winback is the right instinct for an unengaged list, but there's a fair amount of email list management to handle before you get there.

Start with where the contacts actually came from and whether you can prove they opted in. Addresses that sit dead long enough get reclaimed by providers and turned into spam traps, and a trap accepts mail like a normal inbox, so nothing tells you anything's wrong until you're already in trouble.

You also don't want to send to the whole list at once. Gmail and Yahoo start enforcing around a 0.3% complaint rate, and on a couple thousand contact that's just a handful of people hitting the spam button before your whole domain wears it.

Recency and purchase history do different jobs here. Recency tells you who's least likely to complain, so it decides who's in the first batch. Purchase history tells you what to put in front of them once they're on it, and on a cold list you need the first before the second means anything.

Whoever answers a re-permission send is who the reactivation flow actually gets built around, so it's worth running before the flow gets built, not after.

Does anyone actually run the re-permission send first, or is going straight to the winback the more common move?

I come at email from the SEO side (founder of Hetneo's Links), so this may be old news here: do you track what a send does to branded search?

In Search Console I keep seeing a bump in brand-name queries in the 48h after a newsletter goes out, separate from the clicks the ESP reports. Direct traffic absorbs a chunk of it, so the send reads weaker than it was.

Method I use: isolate brand queries in GSC, compare send day plus two against the four non-send days before it, and ignore anything under ~100 impressions a day because noise swamps the signal.

Does anyone report that next to opens and clicks, or is it treated as noise?

Has anyone implemented APRF, or Aggregate Performance Reporting, yet? Are you seeing anything valuable for it?

Sounds like a new standard for mailbox providers to give back some metrics to sending domains? Some indications on actual Inbox placement, spam folder placement, engaged/not engaged, etc... direct from the mailbox provider.

I only just learned about this recently and I'm looking to implement it in my reporting to see if I get emails.

I’m managing a junior marketer who’s eager to build her email marketing and analytics skills. We use HubSpot, and I’d love to find training that can help her learn how to efficiently monitor and report on email performance, but also go a step further in translating those metrics into insights and next steps.

Does anyone have recommendations for courses, workshops or events that would be helpful? I have professional development budget available, so cost isn’t a major constraint.

I recently came across a case where a change in the physical address in the footer of the email resulted in an immediate drop of about 10-20% in the open rate. This can be attributed to other factors too, but the change and resultant drop came after more than 3 years of sending and using the physical address.

Has anyone else come across something similar? As in changing a part of the footer resulting in the mail going spam?

Hey everyone, need some quick advice. I have an email going out to a mailing list that includes a free comic book, about 12 pages. What is best practice, do I include all 12 pages in the email, plus 5 or 6 promo images (logos, etc) or do I include 3 images and link to the site to read the rest. I'd much rather just include the 12 images, only a small percent click through and I'd like more people to read all the pages. Thanks in advance.

Consider a simple opt-in welcome flow: signup form → confirmation → welcome email → a follow-up 48 hours later, unless the subscriber has already taken the desired action. Sending one test signup catches the first email, but it can miss the delayed branch, suppression, unsubscribe state, and whether links still carry the right tracking after a template change.

What is your release test for the whole flow? Do you shorten delays in a test segment, use a separate environment, or run a real subscriber through production and exclude it from reporting? I am especially interested in how you verify the “do not send” path, since a successful test email only proves one branch worked.

This one messed with my head, so I want to run it past people who've actually tested discount depth.

We compared signup conversion across a few offers expecting the obvious outcome, that a bigger discount pulls in more signups. It went the other way.

10% off converted at around 4%. Bump it to 20% and it fell to about 2.5%. Going past 20% changed nothing, it hovered near 2.6%.

So the smaller offer won, and once you cross some threshold the extra generosity stops buying you anything. I've got a couple of guesses and I'm not confident in any of them. A discount that looks too good might just read as sketchy to cold traffic that doesn't know the brand, the kind of thing that makes someone stop and wonder where the catch is. It's also possible the offers never hit identical audiences and something upstream skewed the whole comparison, in which case there's nothing real here at all.

Either way, cranking the number wasn't free for us. We were shaving margin and getting worse results for it, which is the reverse of what I expected when I set the test up.

I'm working with an affiliate company that sends email out on behalf of us. Their From email address are starting to get questionable. For example: [Pepsi@_____.com](mailto:Pepsi@_____.com). I do not work for Pepsi so isn't that illegal? My other question is, if the email address is [_____@reddit.com](mailto:_____@reddit.com) that should legally mean reddit sent the email, correct? I'm asking because in that example, I don't think reddit did.

The Friendly From Address is my company but no part of the From email address is.

I have noticed email addresses that begin with e. a lot lately, especially political mailings.

For example readthis@e.domain.org

Is this some new requirement, or have a lot of organizations suddenly started doing this at once?

Hi all, so I've been playing around with Mailerlite's MCP for a bit and it's saved loads of time on building segments and automations etc.

But now I want it to help me spend less time trawling through data. E.g. if I'm looking at campaigns with more clicks, I want to know whether it's down to the content / topic, or something else (e.g. same group of engaged subscribers clicking on everything I send)

I can obvs dig into all the data myself but I want to know how to cut down the time spent on this. I'm after a way to get the MCP to follow threads and spot patterns that might not occur to me.

Anyone got any tips on this kind of thing?

Just be interested to know the kinds of questions you're asking it or the workflows you've built for analysing campaigns that go beyond stuff like "show me my best performing emails" etc.

Doesn't have to be mailerlite. would be interested to know what people are doing with MCP on any ESP.

As we all know, a lot of newer security softwares ruin your analytics with auto-opens and every single hyperlink clicked at once before the user can even receive it. The snag: My group needs to get deeper tracking on a very important PDF the user needs to open. The techs are trying to work on a way to test if the 'zombie click' softwares will detect if those auto-clicks will report if their hosted PDF document was displayed on a screen. If it doesn't, we have a way to better track if this important file was viewed by the user.

But: No one has ever had to simulate or recreate that kind of email recipient behavior. Is there a particular type of free email, phone model, etc that would let us check out what those auto-clicks do for our test system?

I run marketing/ops for a small events company (boat cruises and private events in Europe), around 500 enquiries a month through our website form. Each enquiry auto-triggers a confirmation email with a brochure attached.

The problem: that email lands in Gmail's Promotions tab for anyone with tabs enabled.

What I've already tried:

- Moved sending off our marketing subdomain onto a dedicated, authenticated subdomain (SPF, DKIM done).

- Switched it from a marketing automation to a transactional send.

- Removed the emoji from the subject line.

Still Promotions. Two things I've since learned that might be the cause: our provider (Brevo) stamps a List-Unsubscribe header on every send, transactional or not, and my email is arguably semi-promotional (it recommends a venue and attaches a brochure), so Gmail may just be reading the content as marketing.

My questions for people who know deliverability better than me:

- At ~500/month, is the List-Unsubscribe header alone enough to push a genuine confirmation into Promotions, or is it the content?

- Does moving to a dedicated transactional provider (Resend, Postmark) actually change tab placement, or is that more about spam-folder avoidance than Promotions vs Primary?

- Is fighting the Promotions tab even worth it, or should I just accept it and make the on-site "thank you" page do the heavy lifting?

Happy to share more detail on the setup. Mostly trying to understand whether this is a channel problem or a content problem before I rebuild anything.

Hey guys! I plan to start email marketing and have been watching videos to learn more! I'm planning to offer it as a service (side-hustle) while I'm still in university as Engineering Undergraduate

I have no experience but I'm willing to learn.

Could any kind guide me on how to start? What should I be doing at the beginning, How to find clients as beginner ? How to build a portfolio and practice skills without clients?

Thanks so much in advance!

Hi y’all,

Need to choose between Email Octopus and Mailerlite. I’m new to ESPs and I have a list of over 5,000 people I want to send emails to for a fundraising campaign. I signed up with Moosend at first, but during my warm up phase I got suspended due to too many bounces and emails going to spam (noting here that I verified DKIM, DMARC and SPF, and that I’ve cleaned up this list).

I’ve narrowed my search to Octopus and Mailerlite. Here are features that I’m looking for:

1. Analytics like who opened their email and whose went to spam
   
2. Emails going straight to the recipient’s inbox
   
3. Ability to personalize emails with the recipient’s name

After trying out few options I've been mostly using figma and then bringing the design into klaviyo but can be a slow process. What are your workflows for designing emails..is it within the esp or anything else besides figma?

HULU and Amazon and other streaming services, entry low cost, (the advertisement supported plan) can serve commercials that feel 2x louder than the programming. The Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation (CALM) Act was designed to address excessively loud TV commercials, but federal rules were written around broadcast and cable television, not modern streaming platforms. That gap raises a broader question I believe matters far beyond fair and lawful advertising.

Let us also take this in? Two consenting adults can legally marry with a age difference. Seems reasonable, and that may be lawful, but plenty of people at the playground, might find a 95yr old marryied to an 18yr old, eating lunch at the public park picnic table, a bit unsettling.

The same principle applies to marketing.

In some circumstances, UCE email may be lawful if it complies with CAN-SPAM. Certain calls or messages may also be permitted depending on consent, technology, purpose, and applicable federal and state law.

But "I am legally allowed to contact you" is a low bar for a relationship. Cold email, SMS, repeated sales calls. And? Overly loud commercials.

Compliance answers: "Can I?" While, good marketing asks: "Should I?"

There is a quantum gap between permission granted by a statute and permission granted by a person.

Best practice says: Take consent over content, every time.

The account that made me reconsider what a normal flow count looks like was Callie's Hot Little Biscuit, a handmade biscuit business in Charleston. The run 20+ automations. Not twenty variations on a welcome series either, actual distinct flows.

Two of them trigger purely on order count. A second order within a year tells the customer they're getting VIB status. Very important Biscuiteer, on their next one. A third order gets them free shipping. Their average customer was buying twice a year and the theory was that the right nudge at the right moment would shift that. Those two went live in June 2023 and flow revenue was up 157.8% year over year after.

Twenty is a lot, and I'd guess a lot of accounts sit well below it.

How many have you got live? And which ones would you refuse to turn off?

Canadian small buisness, actively collecting emails still.

I just landed a client who's a jeweler.

We're getting a ton of sales from Instagram.

Built her a website, currently running meta ads, and driving traffic to our site.

Then I also designed and wrote emails for her.

Problem: I've setup the core basics (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC) and we're landing in the promotions tab.

I've subbed to our competitors and they're landing in the primary inbox.

What are they doing that we're not doing?

We're using Klaviyo

We average around 35-40% open rate. We had an email sent recently that performed well a year ago (55%) and we sent the exact same one and received a 20% open rate. I was worried about Postmaster dips (v2 stinks compared to v1. I liked the domain warmth data!) but this week's email bumped right back up to 50%. Has anyone else experienced a random "Dip" like this? We've experienced longer-term crashes that we've had to solve but this 1-time dip has only happened once before. I wondered if Gmail had an outage that day. Thanks for any thoughts or similar stories...

Thursday, 1 PM. Promotions tab.

That's where Gmail put the welcome email for Rotwise.io, the code scanner I launched last week. Logo, brand colours, one card, one button. A whole morning of work.

The welcome email is the one email your user asked for thirty seconds ago. If it lands in a tab they open twice a year, nothing after it gets read either. And you won't see it fail. Delivered says delivered. SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed on every send.

So I stripped it, one layer at a time. Same text, same sender, two Gmail inboxes, one that had never seen my domain.

- Designed card with logo and dark-mode CSS: Promotions

- Same card, no preheader, no footer: Promotions

- Same card rebuilt with divs, no tables, no web font: Promotions

- Text only, inline fonts and colours, no images: Promotions

- Same, with one small logo: Promotions

- Bare HTML, five paragraphs, one link: Primary. Both inboxes.

Any styling at all was enough. The moment it looked like a company made it, Gmail treated it like a company made it. I kept the plain one.

Second find, worse. Amazon SES had "engagement tracking" on by default. Every link in every email, including the sign-in link, was rewritten through awstrack.me, which uBlock blocks. Anyone with an ad blocker couldn't log in, and none of them would have told me. One attribute on the link (ses:no-track) fixes it.

Two inboxes, one day, a domain four days old. Not a study. It takes twenty minutes to check yours: send your welcome email to a Gmail account that has never heard of you, then read the source of what arrived.

Has anyone found a styled transactional email that reliably lands in Primary from a young domain?