Keeping it real and transparent with Matt Stith of Spamhaus

00:00:05

Eric Trinidad: Welcome to emails not dead. My name is Eric and this is Jonathan.

00:00:08

Jonathan Torres: Hello.

00:00:09

Eric Trinidad: Hello. We're here to talk to you about all things email. And we have a very special guest with us today, Mr. Matt Stith of Spamhaus. He is their industry liaison. He is joining us on the couch. Matt, how are you, sir?

00:00:24

Matt Stith: I'm doing all right, gentlemen. How are you doing today?

00:00:27

Eric Trinidad: A lot better now. A lot better now, that's for sure.

00:00:29

Matt Stith: Excellent. Excellent.

00:00:32

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. So we really appreciate you coming out. I think when we talk about Spamhaus, it's kind of like one of those things that. Who are they? What are they doing? Why am I always blocked by them? But maybe that's just me. I'm glad we got you here to kind of, like, bring back the shield, you know, show folks that you're approachable and they kind of get you out there in the public eye.

00:00:58

Matt Stith: Yeah, absolutely. You know, it's it's one of those things that when you actually meet people from Spamhaus and this goes even before I was here, I've only been with Spamhaus for about five years now, actually a little over five years. Sorry time has no meaning anymore. What day it is? Month it is. What year it is. The main thing that I learned a lot when I was approaching the dark horses of Spamhaus was if you go up and talk to them, they're humans. They put on their spam filters one leg at a time, just like the rest of us. For the most part, it's just, you know, humanizing it. That's one thing that I like to be able to do when I have these types of conversations, let people know that it's not all about the big bad. And we don't just want to block all your mail. We actually want to help you guys fix things. We want to help you educate others, want to help educate yourselves, etc.

00:01:44

Eric Trinidad: No, that's awesome. That's great to hear. So before Spamhaus, like, how did you become, you know, how did you start liaising but what was your gig prior to that?

00:01:57

Matt Stith: So my gig prior to that was at the abuse desk at Rackspace hosting and, you know, worked at the abuse desk there for nine years. And I mean, just going into the whole thing of working at an abuse desk and before that I was the postmaster and I still did postmaster stuff throughout the years that I was at Rackspace until I actually ended up leaving. But, you know, really, I was one of the only ones who was more or less raising my hand saying, yup, I'll go to the conference and learn all this stuff and bring back feedback and go to these sessions. You know, the most important thing when you're talking about somebody who wants to go to a conference, it's you know, a lot of people are like, yay, I get to go hang out with people in the industry and just party all week. It's not that it's really about, you know, connecting with people, learning, you know, who's there in the industry. And that's where, you know, it really comes into the whole me being this industry liaison piece is just it's meeting those people, developing those connections and learning those things and being able to talk intelligently about what we do, because it's very difficult to explain to anybody who doesn't know anything about email or anything about cybersecurity. It's hard to explain, "hey, this is what I do." And even from a what does Spamhaus do to somebody who knows nothing about email, it's quite difficult. It takes me about 15 or 20 minutes to really get it into somebody's mindset of, you know, this is how it works. So, you know, that's kind of, you know, how I got to the thing just going out there, being in the community and you know, I was able to do that with the position at Rackspace.

00:03:32

Eric Trinidad: I think that's one of the big things that we kind of brought back from our recent ventures out into the community. Now that kind of ease-up on the pandemic was just getting out back into the email world. And, you know, I think we say it every time we talk is like just the email community is just so different. It's just so inviting. Everybody's just really, you know, helping each other out and just trying to do better.

00:03:53

Matt Stith: Yes, absolutely.

00:03:54

Jonathan Torres: The industry itself, like what we do in email, I think is so foreign and it's such a foreign concept to a lot of people that I think that's such an essential piece to it is like the liaison portion, but then just kind of getting out there and then talking about it and talking about with people who are trying to do this and who have done this for a little while. And, you know, some of my favorite conversations are with people who've been doing it for a long time and they just never have like peeled back the layers of what to do, how to do it, what's the proper way. So that's probably one of my favorite things about doing this kind of stuff, too, is just kind of reaching out into the community, seeing what's out there, seeing people's level of experience, and then slowly starting to peel that back and kind of get into other stuff. And, and I feel like that's what we had prepared for this episode. I don't know how much will get into all this stuff because this is like the charcuterie board of like podcast episodes, we're just going to touch on everything that we can. And I think it's because we have so many questions about, you know, what's good, what do we want to focus on? Like, what are we seeing out there in the community now? What's the biggest trends? And we kind of like questioned you a little bit on that, Matt. And kind of got into things. Our first topic that we had that was like hot on our mind is transparency, the transparency of communication when things are not going right. And I think that's just one of the big things. We always preach on that, but then like what are the key things that we're looking at there? Because as I wrote down, transparency is not just the color of Crystal Pepsi. It's just one of the nice things that was out there for some time. I don't know if anybody else liked it. I mean, we had one or two that I was okay with. For those that are too young, they might not know what Crystal Pepsi is, but, you know, it's one of those things you may want to try someday.

00:05:22

Matt Stith: Yeah. Just go in the Google machine and it'll tell you about it. Commercials are amazing.

00:05:27

Eric Trinidad: Have some cool Zimas at night.

00:05:31

Matt Stith: Just take, you know, take everything, you know, all of the, don't drink any beer or anything. Just drink Zima, you know, the clear stuff.

00:05:40

Jonathan Torres: It's exactly what it's all about.

00:05:42

Matt Stith: Yeah. The whole concept around transparency, it's funny that we work in a medium that is about communication, yet we're so terrible at it sometimes. And, you know, when it comes to transparency, it's really there's multiple layers there, of course, because everything's anonymous, even, you know, more than ogres. But, you know, when you go to look into it, it's really, you know, letting people know not only just what things are, but why we're great in our industry by saying things like implement two factor authentication, implement all of this authentication stuff, SPF, DKIM, DMARC. BIMI. I'm probably missing one because they're just there's so many acronyms that we have in our stream now that it's just getting a little ridiculous. But we're great at telling people, you know, these are the things we should do, but we don't really say why or how. Well we do a little bit of the why, but the how is where we're just like, nah just go figure it out. There's a Google machine out there. And the unfortunate thing is, is when you go out and go to the Google machine, you get, you know, 3 billion results for this one thing that you put in. And sometimes when you put in things like SPF, it's just an acronym. And we're not unique to, you know, an industry that uses bunch of acronyms. So it's really, you know, when you're communicating with people, make sure that not just saying, you know, what they need to do, but start guiding them down the path of how to get there. You don't have to give them everything. You don't have to cover every single, you know, possible way of implementing something, but just start them down a path, recommend them to certain things. You know, if you want to talk two-factor authentication, you can talk about, hey, you know, Google's got this authenticator thing. Microsoft's got something too, Apple's got something. All these guys have their things. But, you know, just start them down the path and say, hey, you know, what's your preferred platform? And then just start down a path or so, you know, that's a thing of us just, I feel like we're just so horrible at it in our industry. And, you know, then it goes to other pieces when you're talking about transparency is, you know, how you're interacting with other systems outside of your own, other networks outside of your own. A lot of that is completely oblivious to the sender. And what I mean by the senders, I don't mean like Mailgun doing the sending. I mean the actual customers that you have that are doing the sending. Wel'l say that brands, that are sending from your network, there are a lot of things that they just they're not reading all of the things that we're reading every day. They're not reading about how important it is to do authentication. They're not really reading about sunsetting their stuff and guiding people down a certain path at the beginning and also continuously through the life of them working with you will help them quite a bit to also help your company with its reputation. That's an important thing, is just thinking about, you know, not only just certain things about the customer. You just need to let them understand that it's a constant education. It's not one of these things where you set up, you're like, mission accomplished and you're done. Unfortunately, that's not the way things work. You need to be constantly evolving yourself. And we, you know, we as an industry need to be better at letting people understand, hey, you know, things are going to change all the time. We're going to try and make it as bite sized, as simple as possible with telling you, you know, the what, the why and the how. But, you know, you're going to need to do a little bit of this by yourself. But constantly providing that education is an important thing.

00:09:15

Jonathan Torres: I think so many times there's information that comes down, you know, even through blocks and through, you know, kind of notifications and things that are going on that people... And from what I see, like, people just sometimes don't connect the dots like, hey, this is happening and it's a reaction, but they think it's the wrong reaction. And I think that's a part of the transparency thing because like, they're assuming, like, oh, they just don't like what I'm doing or, you know, like there something else that, that influence, or maybe I was compromised when really sometimes it's just things that are being left by the wayside with their practices, like what they're doing is not a complete view of what's going on with things like. And I think that's a big thing that we do on the podcast is try to educate people on, you know, this is what a complaint can do. This is what, you know, unengagement or when you have people aging on your list or, you know, when you're doing those kind of things. And I mean, I'm sorry to put you on the spot, Thomas, but I know, like, there's a bunch of past episodes that I don't think we need to call out. You know, our lovely producer, you know, like who helps us out a lot. But, I mean, I think there's a lot of reference points that we can point back to say, hey, like, this is how you want to do those pieces. And I think that that's definitely a thing is like not every not every company, not every ESP has the ability to put somebody in front of them to say like, hey, this is exactly what you need to do. Like, and I think that's evolving as part of the industry evolves to like more and more people are doing that kind of thing where they're educating their customer base on what all of this means, like how to put pieces together, what each thing relates to. But I definitely think that that's super helpful through logs, through communication, through support from your company that you can start seeing and putting those pieces together because, you know, just because you think that it might correlate to one thing doesn't necessarily mean that. And looking at each one of those individual pieces within your sending stream can definitely, you know, cause a spark and a different reaction that we think that it's going to and really, really help like and coordinate that piece and right. Like. And I think that just kind of falls into the whole transparency thing. I don't know if, Eric, you've got anything to add with that.

00:11:12

Eric Trinidad: One of the things that I kind of wanted to look at, because you've been, you know, with Spamhaus for some time already and looking at the things that have changed and different over time, is there anything that you can share to say, you know, some of the differences that you've seen from when you began to do what you're doing now?

00:11:28

Matt Stith: You guys have may have noticed, other people listening to this podcast might have noticed it, we're trying to be out there a little bit more. We're trying to let you guys understand, hey, hi. We're here. You know, a lot of people do run into challenges when especially when something's listed. Sometimes we can only provide this much information we may have. And I know that people who were probably not going have video for this, but I'm put my hands really close together and now I'm put my hands really, really far apart. And, you know, that's the difference. Sometimes we can share a little bit, sometimes we can share a lot. And that all depends on how we've curated the data, how we brought things together. The thing is, we've detected something. We've found something that's an issue. And the thing that we're really trying to evolve right now is that how, you know, you're listed. It's terrible. How do you fix it? And we're trying to be able to get that to the community, and it's something that we need constant feedback on. I don't expect everybody to write in it with a ticket right now. Please don't. You may upset the ticket wranglers, but you know, especially with that, the thing that we're really trying to evolve is that interaction with the community. Were present on multiple industry slacks, were present on multiple industry mailing lists to make sure that when somebody does run into a problem, they're like, "I don't know," you can definitely come to them. We can respond to certain things. And there have been times where we've done listings in the past where I go back and look at them and I'm like, we could have said a little bit more there to be able to just give them, just a give you some breadcrumbs to go down the way to be able to get them path. But more or less sometimes it's just, here it is. Good luck. And we take that feedback from the community and are able to adopt it towards improving the process and making sure that, you know, not only that our data is accurate and actionable for people who consume it, but also the people that are legitimate and have a problem and need to fix it that they can fix it. So there's two paths there that you want to make sure that you're able to keep the sanctity of the data, but also that when somebody does have a challenge, that they're able to fix it in. They're not just sitting there scratching their head and we want to make sure that we publish resources and all sorts of things. That's why, you know, we're trying to get to I would love to have somebody from Mailgun at some point write something, you know, in regards to maybe an experience that they had with Spamhaus or maybe just an experience that they've had with email in general. Or it could have nothing to do with email. Well, probably should have something to do.

00:13:59

Eric Trinidad: It probably should. Yeah.

00:13:59

Matt Stith: But you know, when it comes down to it's sharing those experiences and not just being like we're Spamhaus, we know everything. I know that we don't know everything. And that's why we do things like this, is have these conversations so we can figure out how to constantly evolve that process. So, you know, when we're talking about when I came on to Spamhaus, it was still, you know, a work in progress. And now we're much further down that path of helping build this community. We know that you have problems and we're here to help and we know that we have some problems. We're asking you to help. That's kind of where we're at right now.

00:14:37

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. It's all about community.

00:14:38

Jonathan Torres: And speaking about stuff that's in the community, like this is one of those ones that like I think is just a good transition, I think to what were some of the other topics that we had talked about and kind of discussed and you know, kind of pick your brain about was the opt-in portions because like an article like that's been out there on the Spamhaus website for a very long time. And it's probably one of my favorites and one of those that I've had bookmarked for a very long time, because I've definitely had people ask me, What does double opt-in mean, like, what does that actually go through? And like when you look at the article Spamhaus has a really good one. Go in and just type in and search for like marketing guidelines, like marketing email guidelines, email marketing guidelines. When you hit the Spamhaus article, like one of the first things that's on there is double opt-in what it means, like how to define it and then how to do it. And that's, I mean, my favorite like I love like sending people that way because so many people are just, they assume that checkbox is going to be okay or that, you know, they can be totally fine, you know, kind of skipping past that. But when you have somebody who I think is as respected as Spamhaus is in the community and, you know, people like look up to it and really pay attention when things happen on the platform. Really, that's such a powerful thing to be able to share with people when they recognize a name. They see who it's coming from and what they've said about it. I love it. We've kind of gotten to the conversation last time about opt-ins and then holding on to that information I think is really the way you put it Matt and I love that concept because yeah, you can opt somebody in, but does that mean they're opted in forever? Also like and then where are you going? Are you moving ISPs? Are you taking that information with you? Are you documenting that? Because when it does get called out and called back, are you going to be able to produce that info and just kind of like, I guess like a question coming out from that since I covered a lot of what we talked about is do you see that happen a lot? Like is that something that you see often where people are just like, "well, I don't know how I got this opt-in" and then they're out in left field at that point?

00:16:22

Matt Stith: So, yeah, you know, this also goes back to the transparency part. You know, when if you as the brand, let's say the brand, so we'll say brand senders and receivers. So you as the brand if you've had somebody opt-in that's your opt-in. That's not Mailgun's opt-in or I can keep listing ESPs and go on forever till we all die but when it comes to that it's your opt-in and you know as the brand it's your responsibility to keep track of it. You know, however, there are certain metrics that you want to be able to track. You want to track things like engagement. And I know that we can talk about the stuff that Apple has done with their mail privacy protection MPP, I think was what people are calling it. And when it comes to that, you know, that breaks a little bit of those things. There's also other ways to think about engagement. Not only are you monitoring, you know, clicks and opens, but if you have a, you know, a shopping cart and you send receipts to somebody, has that person logged in and bought something from you, that's a sign of engagement. Have they gone to your website in some way, shape or form or fashion? That's a way of monitoring that thing. And, you know, make sure that I'm not telling you what to set the rule at, I'm not saying, you know, do it at five, do it at ten, do it at twenty. Whatever you want to do it at. That's up to you. Don't make it forever. That's really all I'm saying is don't make it forever. One thing that, you know, we talked about a little bit was, you know, recent events, you know, big events. So like, you know, we talked about, you know, the queen's passing, the Ukraine war, and of course, this whole pandemic thing, you know, that little thing that happened two years ago.

00:18:04

Eric Trinidad: Yeah. Oh, that old thing?

00:18:05

Matt Stith: And is still, you know, among us today. When it was the beginning of the pandemic, man I was receiving emails from like, you know, I bought like I think it was a car parts place. I bought like a some sensor, probably an oxygen sensor from it. I bought the oxygen sensor in like 2005 and I never went to the website and I got this thing and I was like, what? The fortunate thing is I don't delete my email. So I saw that, I saw that I bought it. So I had the receipt for it, but I was like, guys, I didn't do anything with you for 15 years and now you want to tell me about how you're doing all of these things with COVID and I imagine that everybody who's on who's listening to this has probably got some type of email like that.

00:18:50

Eric Trinidad: I think you were targeted because of course you had bought the oxygen sensor. It's a respiratory issue.

00:18:56

Matt Stith: Oh yeah!

00:18:58

Matt Stith: Yeah. And I got one from vitamin D supplement company. It was weird. So pay attention to your engagement. You know, it's important to pay attention to your engagement, but, you know, when we're talking about the opt-in and stuff, it belongs to you. It's something you should keep track of. And, you know, you need to make sure that if there is an issue with an address, you should be, you know, asking your sender company about it. If, you know, if somebody says, I didn't get the email, you know, sometimes there's this whole concept of these suppression lists. And it was a discussion that's happening with the industry right now, how to make them more transparent. And what that is, is letting somebody not only know that, hey, this isn't the suppression list, it bounced, but why? Why did it bounce? Or, you know, when did it bounce? Is it going to come off the suppression list? And, you know, when and if it goes back on the suppression list again, there's you know, is there a three strikes and that type of thing? And, you know, sometimes when people move from ESP to ESP, sometimes that suppression data doesn't transfer over. So they're like, here's my list. And then they go and put it into the thing, and then they get blacklisted. Because I'm not saying that it was Spamhaus that's going to do the blacklisting, but it may be a receiver who had a bunch of users that were like, Nope, I don't want this email, you know? So they clicked. Instead of clicking unsubscribe, they clicked on complaint or spam. One thing that I want to really, you know, get into some of these mailbox providers about is the fact that delete and report spam are right next to each other. Makes it really easy to click one or the other. And, you know, it was a thing that I can remember going back to Rackspace is you would know when somebody did that because they would select all and then they would click report as spam. And what they usually do is go and select all delete because they read all their messages and then they click select all and they click delete. But they're right next to each other. So it's just a confusing thing. But, you know, make sure that you pay attention to what's happening with all of your recipients, be it that, you know, are they getting rejected and are they in a suppression or anything? And also, you know, definitely honor your unsubscribes. Just because you move to a new provider doesn't mean that you can start emailing them again. I don't really think I need to get to the whole thing about opting in. It's a thing that you have to do. So let somebody know, Hey, do you want my messages? Not just to click box, but you need to actually contact them about it and have them verify. And then you can have all of that chain of custody. So you understand that from this point, I have all of this data about you, and I know that some people are oh, my gosh, GDPR. No, this is data about you that is related to me sending you information. So it being able to have that is very important. So, you know, just make sure that A, you know, you're sticking to your message, you're sticking to who you are. And B, check out your suppression list, check out what's happening with the, you know, the mail stream with your users. Do those opt-in starts and, you know, realize that your opt-in data, the list that you have it is yours. So make sure that you take care and custody of it and you know that that person, whoever that is that's responsible for that, should be the guy or lady that understands, you know, all of the things, you know, in regards to that. It's not saying that everybody in the company needs to know exactly how often suppression list bounces and all of this stuff works. You know, they can pass that knowledge down as they need to. I went along a long way down a little rabbit hole there, and then we kind of went through some stuff through some holes. There was a carrot here, onion here.

00:22:45

Eric Trinidad: So that's all good. That's all good. I think, you know, ultimately, like consent is king, right? Like you want to make sure you did that regardless.

00:22:55

Matt Stith: Oh yeah.

00:22:55

Eric Trinidad: And then, you know, our tastes change all the time. I think JT and I talk about that pretty, pretty regularly. You know, we were super into hot topic like maybe like five or six years ago.

00:23:07

Jonathan Torres: That's too recent and it's got to be a lot longer than that.

00:23:11

Eric Trinidad: Really. Is it only?

00:23:15

Eric Trinidad: Time isn't the same anymore?

00:23:17

Thomas Knierien: I'm still into hot topic, so i'll put the record on straight for that one.

00:23:21

Eric Trinidad: Oh, yeah, yeah. No, no, no.

00:23:24

Jonathan Torres: It's just for those exclusive vinyl pops.

00:23:26

Eric Trinidad: Yeah.

00:23:28

Jonathan Torres: That's such a great way of putting it Matt like, I really like that because it's like that, that chain of custody like that that you have. And even when you're tracking some of those things, like you're tracking the I guess like keeping that data right? Like if it's important to you to have a customer for whatever reason, right? And I think so many times and again, I know I've said it like a billion times on this podcast, but the whole ROI piece, right, like email for a lot of people equals money. And if it's important enough to hold on to an email address for whatever amount of time with whatever you're doing or for whatever reason, because you believe that's going to help in some form of economic impact down the line, then you're probably keeping some other form of information for that. And you should try to keep also the next portion of it, right? Try to do the next piece. That is the keeping information from the very beginning, the opt-ins where it came from, like how it got through to you. And that just should be a big part of your data set too, because yeah, once you have to start tying things in and you really should tie things in if you're not already signing into, you know, what their activity is. Right. And this is the thing that will go on with engagement. Right? Where are they coming to you? What are they doing? You know, recently we just had a conversation with Chad S. White that had like that exact thing. Right? That's one of the things he preaches on is where is it where else are they existing within your platform or connected to you as a company, as a brand. And that's what you need to hold on to. But if you don't start from the very top with that opt-in, how they came to be on your list and how you started collecting new information like that, you need to do that. That's got to be the place to start.

00:24:52

Matt Stith: And, you know, it's interesting when you talk about things like ROI, you know, if somebody, you know, $500 and then is zero for seven. Years is that, you know, everybody pays in $500. Let's just put me on make it simple. You know, they pay $500 and then there's zeros for seven, eight, ten, fifteen years. Is that really you know, do you really need to be sending that guy? Should you be sending to and taking care and custody of the guy who's for twelve years has been spending $500 every single time. I understand that some people are like, I need to have as many, you know, email addresses in my list as possible so I can get as high as ROI as I can, yeah, that's not necessarily always the truth. It's the same thing when people start asking things about, you know or the size of our lists. I'm like, now does it really matter? Is the spam getting blocked? Is it effective for you? You know, those are the questions that I'd like people to ask, not, you know, how big is it? Does it really matter in terms of, you know, blocking abuse? Like I could say so, yes, we block all 4 billion IPv4 addresses like sure, but that's going to give you a bunch of false positives and make people angry. But, you know, just make sure that you try and pursue, I know there's a fine line between the quantity, quality type of thing, but, you know, just make sure you try and find yourself a nice fine line in there and you'll be doing better.

00:26:15

Jonathan Torres: You're getting a better spot. I mean, again, like everybody trying to improve, trying to push the meters forward, right? Like ignorance is not a good defense. I think a lot of times like I think I have so many people want to plead ignorance that they didn't know or that they had no clue or that they were misunderstood in general, you know, kind of what to do and which way to go or how to do it. But I mean, that really doesn't matter. When you're seeing abuse in the system, it's hard to do when you have a job to do, when there's a job that these filtering companies, all the filtering companies, everybody that's looking at that reputation piece, it makes it so much more difficult to then filter out from the people who are wanting to do good, wanting to do the right thing, and sending legitimate email, but just doing something wrong. And compared to somebody who's just been abusive, it's very hard to delineate that when somebody isn't doing those right things right? If somebody moved over from, you know, sitting on an ESP for years and constantly doing the same thing, and they had a suppression list built up and they transfer over to somewhere else. And they don't bring that suppression list. You know, they don't bring the people that have opted out and or remove them have been proactively removing them from their list so that any unsubscribe remains unsubscribed. And then all of a sudden you see an influx of, you know, bad email come through. Like that's going to look exactly the same as somebody who's being abusive in a lot of instances. And we really shouldn't put that blame on the filter on the, you know, the filtering company, the people that are trying to help out and trying to be, you know, a good member of the community. That's why it's important for you as a sender for anybody who's doing the sending piece to pay attention to those little things because it can be real bad. You can end up in a really bad spot.

00:27:44

Matt Stith: Absolutely. When you talk about filtering, we publish reputation data. We don't filter anything. We don't block anything, we just publish the lists. As much as people would like to think that we are, you know, some international organization of thugs or whatever, I've heard all sorts of things. It's incredible. But, you know, when it comes down to it, you know, we really want to help make that badness. Let's just say, you know, there's a badness circle. We want to make that badness circle as small as possible. And then what we want to do is we want to get all those good people out there to, you know, be, whew, we're all good. But, you know, we want to get the badness as small as possible because it's a lot easier for us to just say, we're not going to work with you because you're not willing to do A, B, C and D.You know, we can go through the whole alphabet. But you know what? What we need to focus on is, is stopping those bad people. I don't want to worry about the legitimate companies. I'm fine with, you know, providing you insights, providing you data, providing you things to help you better protect yourself. But at the end of the day, you know, we as legit companies need to work together and then we need to be able to get out of any of these practices that are bringing on the legitimacy to our companies. And that's the focus that you really need to think about.

00:29:10

Jonathan Torres: I really wish you would have graced us in a more visual format and you could have worn, you know, a broad-rim hat and, you know, villainous curly mustache. That would've been awesome.

00:29:20

Matt Stith: I was thinking a top hat and a monocle.

00:29:23

Jonathan Torres: There you go. I like that.

00:29:23

Matt Stith: So, yeah, about a week ago, I injured my calf muscle. So I was walking with a cane so I could have done a monocle, top hat, and cane would have been great.

00:29:33

Jonathan Torres: That would have been perfect.

00:29:36

Jonathan Torres: We'll, just let everybody manage that.

00:29:37

Matt Stith: Yeah sure yeah. One of you guys is probably good at Photoshop.

00:29:44

Eric Trinidad: Thomas, can you make that our thumbnail? Just Matt just in a monocle?

00:29:48

Thomas Knierien: It can be done. I'll see what I can do.

00:29:52

Eric Trinidad: Just glad that you're out here in the universe. You're a real person just showing everybody that you actually exist. One. Two, you're approachable and I don't care what Jonathan says, you're a nice guy, you know? And you know, you're somebody we can talk to and actually converse with and making just our sending lives better all the way around, right?

00:30:16

Matt Stith: Yeah. Well, Jonathan's just mean and come on. Hot topic. Really?

00:30:21

Jonathan Torres: I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

00:30:24

Matt Stith: It's okay, man. It's all right. You know, we all have our crosses to bear.

00:30:28

Eric Trinidad: Yeah.

00:30:32

Matt Stith: The starter jackets.

00:30:34

Thomas Knierien: Don't be hating on my studded belts.

00:30:38

Jonathan Torres: Yeah, I'm sorry.

00:30:40

Eric Trinidad: But we'll see what we're all wearing for the next conference, for sure.

00:30:43

Matt Stith: Yeah, definitely.

00:30:45

Jonathan Torres: Anywhere you want to point people to Matt, like any kind of resources or anything you want to kind of shine a light on.

00:30:50

Matt Stith: We have a deliverability e-book. I can't remember the actual URL for it because they're usually this long and nobody can see my hands. But they're this long.

00:31:02

Eric Trinidad: Yes. They're long.

00:31:04

Matt Stith: Yes. Huge.

00:31:04

Eric Trinidad: Yes.

00:31:05

Matt Stith: And, you know, just, you know, pay attention to some of the things that that we say on the Twitterverse and the LinkedInverse. You know, you can just hit us up with a follow. You know, if you are part of the, you know, the email community in general and you're on slacks and stuff, you know, if you run into something, reach out, you can say something. I may not be able to respond in time. I'm only one person. There are a couple of us on some of those slacks. But you know, for the most part, I'm monitoring anything that says anything about Spamhaus. Sometimes it's explicative, explicative, Spamhaus explicative. But you know, but for the most part, you know, I want to try and help folks out. And, you know, I would love to be able to, you know, at some point do a follow up with you guys because there is more to talk about. We could go on for hours and hours and forever and ever and ever.

00:32:06

Eric Trinidad: That'd be awesome.

00:32:07

Matt Stith: You know, it's it's one of these let's have a thing. And, you know, that's really where it's at. So just you can see me on the community and on the I'm on the LinkedIn's, I'm on Twitter, but I just lurk because I just check things for stuff about Spamhaus that's about it. And sports. The rest of Twitter I try to ignore. Because it's yeah. But I think we all know. It's just yeah.

00:32:38

Eric Trinidad: Well, we're all about the good stuff here. So, Thomas, if people want to find more good stuff about the podcast, where can they find some more information, sir?

00:32:47

Thomas Knierien: Yeah. If you want to find information about the podcast, you can head to our website. Mailgun.com. Head to our resources center. Also going to give a shout-out to Spamhaus's e-book. It looks like it's called the know-how of deliverability 101. So we'll also point a link to that in the session description for this episode. So yeah, we'd be happy to have you back, Matt, it'd be a lot of fun. So thank you for coming on.

00:33:10

Matt Stith: Absolutely. Maybe, maybe we can do one live and everybody in person.

00:33:14

Everyone : Yeah.

00:33:15

Matt Stith: From the bar.

00:33:17

Jonathan Torres: I like it. I like that idea.

00:33:18

Eric Trinidad: I like it. Well, Matt, thank you so much again. Appreciate your time and your knowledge. Everybody else, join us next time.