I’m Dan Oshinsky, and I run Inbox Collective, an email consultancy. I'm here to share what I've learned about doing great work and building amazing teams.
There are three big things that any email sender needs to set up to properly authenticate their emails: SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These are the three things that an email client like Gmail looks for to make sure that the person or company sending that email really is who they say they are.
And one of my readers pointed out that there was a small issue with part of my authentication settings. Not great — especially for someone who professionally helps out his clients with email authentication!
It was late in the evening, and I’d already had a full day of calls and work. The smart move was to wait until the morning, then make the necessary changes.
Instead, I thought: I do this all the time! I’ve got expertise here — let’s just do it now! So I quickly made some changes, and of course, I made a small mistake.
But when it comes to email authentication, there are no small mistakes — only big ones. And so I woke up the next morning to find out that not only had I made a mistake with my email settings, but now all of my emails were going to spam. I’d taken a bad situation and made things far worse!
A few hours later, the mistake was fixed, but not after quite a bit of panic and a lot of me slamming my head against my desk, asking myself why I’d been too impatient to wait until the morning when I would have been rested and fully ready to take on this task.
I wasn’t happy with myself. But at least I learned a few things — most importantly, the right steps I should follow next time with a client to make sure we get things right.
Everyone makes mistakes — even the experts. You learn from them, you figure out processes to make sure they don’t happen again, and then you move on.
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That’s what my authentication settings look like now. The big three — SPF, DKIM, and DMARC — are at the bottom. There are only two options: PASS or FAIL. (You can probably figure out which is one you want.)
Bob Uecker’s a former baseball player, and longtime radio broadcaster for the Milwaukee Brewers. (You might also remember him as the announcer from the movie “Major League.”) Last week, on the final day of the season, with the Brewers eliminated from postseason contention, Uecker spent the final broadcast of the season telling baseball stories.
Bob Uecker today talking about how he started with the Brewers scouting the Northern League. He didn’t know to have a stopwatch. “I’d cup my hands like I had a stopwatch, then ask the guy next to me, ‘What did you have him at?’ They’d say ‘3.4 seconds.’ I’d say ‘Yeah, me too.'”
It reminded me of something Adrienne Miller described in her book, “In the Land of Men,” about her first day at GQ:
“As [GQ editor David] Granger and I spoke, it became apparent that I did have one thing going for me: I was able to talk about past issues of GQ. Later, he said that I got the job because I was the one person he’d interviewed who’d actually even bothered to open the magazine.”
“ ‘Never underestimate how unprepared most people are,’ he would later observe, correctly.”
Don’t forget your stopwatch. Read the magazine in advance. And if you’re not sure what you need for the first day, ask. Otherwise, you might not be prepared to do the work.
Two decades ago, I flew British Airways for the first time. I was 13 years old, and it was the greatest flight I’d ever been on.
What made it so great? Two words: Personal TVs. Every seat had its own television, and each TV had a dozen channels. You could flip through and watch any movie or TV show playing on that channel. For a kid like me — especially one who didn’t have cable TV yet — this was heaven.
Tonight, I flew on British Airways for the first time since that flight. And I’m pretty sure it was the same plane I’d flown on 22 years earlier.
What makes me think that? Well, they still had the same TVs — and they still had that same lineup of channels.
In 2022, we’ve come to expect a little more from our in-flight entertainment. We expect there to be dozens, if not hundreds, of on-demand movies and TV shows.
This flight had two channels, showing two movies of their choice, and a picture quality that reminded me of the days of rabbit ears on our set-top box.
Look, I know this is a first-world problem. And it the end, it didn’t really matter at all. Instead of watching a movie, I read a book, did a little work, and took a nap.
But it was a nice reminder of how far things have come in the past few years. The next time I’m flying and I *only* have a few dozen options to choose from, I might be a little more grateful. Sometimes, you need a little reminder to remember how good you’ve got it.
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That’s a photo of the TV at my seat. The wavy lines aren’t the result of any weird pixelation caused when taking a photo of a screen — that’s just what the screen looked like.
When a reader signs up for Not a Newsletter, they immediately get a welcome email from me, in which I ask two things: Do you have a newsletter, and what’s the biggest challenge you’re facing with it?
Sometimes, the replies will be small and easy to reply to. Struggling with growth? Here are a few slides. Need help with a survey? Here are a few examples.
But other times, the replies involve a weightier topic — writers at major crossroads. I used to send back long responses to these readers, making the argument for why I thought they might want to head in a certain direction. What I discovered is that often, despite a thoughtful and well-sourced reply, they’d go in an entirely different direction.
These readers, I realized, weren’t looking for advice — they just wanted a place to vent.
It didn’t matter if my advice was good or bad. They weren’t looking for advice, and it wasn’t my place to give it.
So I’ve started changing how I reply to those messages. When I think I’ve got one of those emails in my inbox, I try to validate their reply (“That’s such an interesting challenge! I’ve had a few other readers struggle with this — it’s not easy!”) before asking a question or two in reply. I don’t share as many links as I do with other readers. Again, they’re venting, so my job is to listen. The right reply isn’t a solution — it’s a question.
These readers are going to make their own choices. All I can do is listen, ask, and hope that whatever choices they make are the right ones for them.
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That’s the email they reply to when someone signs up for my newsletter, which, by the way, you can do here.
I just spent a week up in New England in a cabin, on a lake, in the woods. We didn’t have electricity or internet or cell service. My clients were excited about it: “You deserve a full week off,” they told me. My wife was excited about it: “You’ve earned this!” she said.
I was terrified.
I was terrified of the emails I’d get while I was gone. I was worried that I’d return to find 400 urgent requests that I was a week late on. I was worried that something terrible would happen to a client while I was gone and I wouldn’t be able to help.
And I logged back on yesterday to find… well, about 70 emails that actually required a personal reply. Not a single one was urgent. My website was still functioning. The Google Doc was still live. Nothing broke or went terribly wrong.
And in the week I was gone, I truly got the chance to unplug. I read three books, I swam, I napped, I did a whole lot of nothing.
Today, I’ll reply to all those emails, and tomorrow, I’ll get back to work. But I’m glad I got the chance to unplug.
Turned out that for all my fears, everyone else was right: It was OK to take a week off, and it was worth it.
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That was the view from my cabin. I kept my phone off most of the week, but did turn it on once or twice to take photos.
A few months ago, I wrote about living in the moment. “Sometimes,” I wrote, “you’ve got to try something because, honestly, when are you going to get to do it again?”
Sunday was one of those days.
A few months ago, Paul McCartney announced that he was going on tour. One of the dates on a Sunday night in Baltimore. A few childhood friends texted me: Was I in for the show?
Sally and I were — but there was one complication. We’d be coming from a wedding in Connecticut, six states and 300 miles away. It’s a 6-hour drive in normal traffic, but on a summer weekend on I-95, six hours becomes 10 quickly.
We said yes anyway.
Was it a lot of driving? Yes. Did we somehow make it on time? Yes. Were we exhausted by the end of the night? Yes.
Was it worth it to see freaking Paul McCartney play a three-hour, 37-song set? Oh, absolutely.
Sometimes, you have to do something just because you might never get the chance to do it again.
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That’s a photo of Paul on stage in Baltimore. My buddy Ian took the photo. (We had pretty good seats, but Ian had amazing seats.)
When I have conversations with writers in advance of the launch of their newsletter, they often worry about the name of the product. They’ll worry that it’s not clever enough, or that it might be too simple, or that they need to spend more time coming up with the perfect name. (I’m guilty of doing this myself.)
So here’s a story for you, if you’re thinking that the name of your next product launch isn’t quite right:
I was in Sonoma, California, a few weeks ago, walking through their downtown, when I passed a store I’ve seen many times before: Williams-Sonoma. If you’ve bought cookware at any point in your life, there’s a decent chance you thought about buying it from Williams-Sonoma.
I’d never thought much about their name before. But walking past the store, I had that moment. Not an “aha!” moment, but an, “Oh, duh!” moment.
The Sonoma in Williams-Sonoma must mean… they were founded here.
So what about the Williams part? There was a small sign right by the door about Chuck Williams — the man who bought a hardware shop in Sonoma, California, in 1956, and turned it into a store for home cooks.
Chuck Williams. Sonoma, California.
Often, keeping things simple is just the easiest decision — it’s also the right decision.
There’s a lot that’s frustrating about being human, but here’s one thing that’s annoyed me a lot lately: You’re not always at your best.
There are days you show up to do the work, and things feel a little off. It doesn’t matter what the work is — it could be a project, or a big piece of writing, or a day on the golf course. Some days, you show up and know you’re not quite right, even if things felt amazing the last time you showed up to do this work.
It’s hard to accept that your body feels a little different today, that your mind’s in a different place, that your energy’s different than usual. Maybe you know why, or maybe you don’t. But you know, because you know yourself:
Today will be less than perfect.
I like being at my best. I like how confident I feel when I know that I’m doing my best work.
But there’s something to be said for getting through those days when you’re at 70%, when it’s not all there. You make the most of what you can with what you have that day. You find a way.
Accept less-than-perfect for today. Better days will come.
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Naturally, that post was inspired by a morning on the golf course. The day before, I hit the ball so well and felt confident over every shot. The next day, it looked like I’d never hit a golf ball before. It happens.
I was scrolling through LinkedIn last weekend, and in a span of two minutes, saw the same story — same copy, same three images — pop into my feed twice.
The story was about Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed violinists of our era. He’ll soon be playing live with orchestras in Portland, Oregon, Stockholm, Sweden, Yerevan, Armenia, and Paris, France — and that’s just in the next four weeks. He performs on a Gibson ex Huberman, crafted by Antonio Stradivari in 1713, a violin twice-stolen and most recently purchased for a reported $3.5 million. And in January 2007, as part of an experiment with The Washington Post, during the morning rush hour at Washington’s L’Enfant Plaza, he performed six classical pieces over the course of 43 minutes, as workers hurried from the Metro station to their offices. The experiment, as the Post’s Gene Weingarten explained, was to answer a simple question: “In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?”
Now, you might already know the answer to that question — possibly because you remember the story, which won a Pulitzer Prize, or possibly because you’re smart enough to guess the answer (“no”), but most likely because you’ve seen a version of this story pop into one of your social media feeds over the past 15 years, just as I did over the weekend.
And that version of that story was almost certainly wrong.
Weingarten, the writer of the original piece, tried to set the record straight in a 2014 column. After the piece was published, someone published a summary of the piece to the web. Weingarten found sixteen different errors in it — impressive when you consider that the summary was only 24 sentences long. As he explained:
“This piece — most people’s only direct knowledge of the stunt and its aftermath — was filled with errors significant and trivial, but relentless in their carelessness. I just re-read it, and it is almost incomprehensible how this could have happened, unless the writer read the original piece, forgot about it, and then, months later, tried to summarize it from memory, as though it were not available in original, checkable form just a few clicks away.”
That summary has since been copied and pasted thousands upon thousands of times, and has slowly gathered additional errors as it moves around the web. In the error-filled 2014 version, six people stopped to listen to Bell’s performance, and in total, he made $32. In the 2022 LinkedIn version, of which there are hundreds of posts with identical copy and identical images, four passerbys stopped, Bell made $20, and also, the entire thing took place in New York. (For the record: It took place in Washington, seven stopped, and he made a little more than $32, not including a larger bill dropped in by the one Washingtonian that day who happened to recognize him.)
People share this story for all sorts of reasons. I remember reading it in 2007 as a Ferris Bueller-esque reminder to stop and look around every once in a while. In 2014, Weingarten explained that many religious leaders liked to share the story as proof that beauty is everywhere. On LinkedIn, I saw the story being shared by recruiters as proof that you should look for a new job if your talents aren’t being appreciated at your current company. It’s a great story, and one that can apparently mean just about anything to anyone. It’s what might happen if Hermann Rorschach had written an Aesop’s Fable or two, and asked his patients to interpret that instead of an inkblot.
And I’m sharing this story with you for an entirely different reason. It’s as a warning and a reminder: Be careful about the data you cite when you tell stories like these.
Often, when I’m working with a new client, they’ll mention a tactic they want to try, but then mention a benchmark that’s wildly out of line with reality, and I have to work hard to help them readjust their expectations. A good example: A few years back, there was a story about a local newsletter that used paid acquisition to grow their list. The tactic is just fine — spending money on ads to grow your list is absolutely something certain publishers should try! — but this client kept quoting the cost to acquire an email address, not realizing that the publisher from the story was in a different country, and the amount quoted wasn’t in American dollars. They had the right idea, but somewhere along the way, the data had lost crucial context. (This meant that they were prepared to spend three times what they should have to acquire a single email address.) I’ve seen this sort of mistake happen with large publishers, with individual writers, and every type of newsletter creator in between.
So I’ll say it here again: Be careful about the data you cite when you tell stories like these — it might be wrong, and it might be leading you down the wrong path.
(And if you see someone sharing a story about a New York-based violist who made $20, do yourself a favor and don’t share it.)
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At top, that’s a screenshot of one of the LinkedIn posts. As of this writing, there are over 40 pages of LinkedIn results for the story, all of which are nearly identical. There are even a few in different languages, which appear to have been copied into Google Translate and then copied over from there.
There’s a clip going around with Jon Stewart, who recently sat in on Howard Stern’s show. Stewart’s success in show business is incredible — he won, roughly, a billion Emmys as host of “The Daily Show,” and gave dozens of comedians and writers a huge boost in their careers. Just look at the page of “Daily Show” alums for a moment. It’s a who’s who of current comedy legends.
So Stern wanted to know how Stewart felt about seeing some of the biggest names from his show — comedians like Stephen Colbert, John Oliver, and Samantha Bee — go on to success after leaving “The Daily Show.” Did he ever feel envious of their success?
His answer was so wonderful:
“I never had that sense that someone else’s success was to the detriment of mine. I think it leads to such bitterness when you look at the world as finite and resource-guarded. It leads to such bitterness, and it’s destructive as an emotion. I’ve always felt that everybody’s success expands opportunity.”
I love that quote, and have been thinking about it in relation to the work that I do now. In the newsletter space, it’s easy to look at the success that others are having and think: That should be me! But the truth is: Every time someone launches a great new newsletter, it opens up doors for so many new writers. Those success stories show us all what’s possible with email, what can be done. And when someone succeeds in the industry, it gets so many new writers and creators excited about trying to replicate that success.
There are so many more opportunities in the newsletter space now than there were a decade ago, or even three years ago. Those success stories have expanded opportunities for all of us.
