Today is another big day for email people: M3AAWG has announced the publication of the completely revised Best Common Practices document for Senders. I co-chair the Senders’ Committee along with my friend and colleague Tara Natanson of Constant Contact, and this document has been the Committee’s biggest project for the last 3 years or so.

I am honored to have been asked to write an introduction for publication on the M3AAWG public site. I think it came out well. An important part of understanding what the BCP is intended to do is understanding what it is not.

The BCP is not a legal opinion. It’s not a position paper. It’s a prescriptive document that enunciates [the rules of the road] and the reasons why they came to be what they are. It is also most assuredly not a deliverability document. A sender can implement every best practice described in the BCP and still see deferrals and rejections. It is not a panacea for your current deliverability woes. The real point of these best practices is to make it easier for recipient domains to distinguish your SMTP traffic from abusive traffic so they can sink the bad stuff and free up infrastructure to handle the good stuff quickly. Deliverability is an organic result of correct implementation of best practices. The greater the distance a sender can create between the email they send and mail that is abusive in nature, the better results they will enjoy. When senders start operating by the rules of the road and follow best practices, deliverability starts to sort itself out.

Congratulations to M3AAWG, the Senders’ Committee, and in particular to Tara Natanson for all of their hard work. You can read the entire introduction and grab a copy of the BCP over at the official M3AAWG web site.