We’ve honestly been insanely excited for this Volume…

Why? Well, today’s guest has been someone who we’ve (honestly) looked up to for such a long time over our very own email journey.

You get people out there who know stuff. And then you get folks who make the people who know stuff better at what they know.

And our esteemed guest, Lauren Meyer, is one of the best examples in the email space we can espouse for doing exactly that!

Lauren’s experience, her love for the email community and support are something we aspire to. Not only championing email, but making the space for email senders one that’s filled with the right knowledge, support and direction.

And that’s why today is such an immense privilege to have her speak about precisely that for our humble community!

She also runs the Send It Right newsletter, one of our personal favourite emails for all things email, deliverability and community, and something you want to make your inbox a better place.

But read on, because Lauren’s prepared an absolute GEM today 💎

And if you’re looking for the best in email advice, this email is sure as heck one of the best places to start.

When Des shared the scope of topics for a guest spot in this newsletter, my natural inclination was to jump at the top one and not even read the rest.

After all, deliverability was my first email crush, and it still burns brightly to this day — enough so that I’ve dedicated my entire newsletter to it.

But the longer I sat with that list, the more obvious something became: despite how different all of these disciplines are, they all eventually run into the exact same wall…

That moment when the documentation stops helping… when the edge case shows up… where you need context, nuance, judgment, or reassurance that you’re not losing your damn mind.

And in email, that usually means finding another human.

Think about how different those topics actually are.

Deliverability lives in the technical weeds. Content creation is almost pure craft. Building an offer is strategic. AI tools are evolving faster than anyone can document. Design, automation, sponsorships... each living in its own universe with its own ways of going spectacularly wrong.

And yet every single person working in any of these areas has had the same experience at some point: the moment where the blog post runs out. Where the course doesn't cover your specific situation. Where the AI confidently gives you an answer that is either outdated, oversimplified, or just plain wrong. Where you've exhausted every resource at your disposal, and you're still stuck.

So then what do you do? You find a person.

It's not a bug, not really. It's just... email. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Annoying? Yes. But surprising? Not really.

Because email problems are specific. They live inside your ESP, your list, your sending history, your business model, your industry's particular quirks. No matter which corner of email you work in, the moment things get complicated, the answer almost always comes from another human who's been (at least somewhere close to) where you are.

And it’s that shared experience of needing each other to get the job done properly that brings so many of us together… that keeps us in this industry for decades.

Email people take care of email people — regardless of which weird little corner of email we ended up in. Because email is complicated. Through and through. Every part of it. And regardless of our discipline within it, we've all been through some shit.

The email industry has grown up through what is honestly not far off from the high school equivalent of hallway whispers, gossip columns, and occasionally… very occasionally, an actual announcement that came in over the loudspeaker or during a pep rally in the HS gym.

Most of what we learned has been passed down by those who either built it, supported it, or… those unfortunate souls who spent 55 hours painstakingly figuring something out themselves and then took the time to share that hard-fought knowledge with someone else — to save them from the stress of having their client (or boss) tapping them on the shoulder because there was ZERO documentation of this problem ever happening before.

A lot of us learned the hard way. Still do.

There is a wealth of information right under our noses.

Books, blogs, courses, newsletters, podcasts, webinars, social media… and now AI… all chiming in on how to do basically everything in email.

Yet somehow, a lot of that information still doesn’t actually help you solve the problem in front of you.

Finding information isn’t the hard part anymore. It’s figuring out who’s speaking from lived experience, who’s extrapolating from one hyper-specific edge case, who’s repeating consensus, and who’s just remixing things that sounded smart on LinkedIn three weeks ago.

Because a lot of advice sounds like a friggin’ boss until you try applying it to your own sender, audience, infrastructure, or business model.

And don’t get me wrong… I love a good blog. Newsletter, too! Write ‘em as often as I can.

But email advice is rarely specific enough to solve the issue you're actually facing.

It lacks context. Or would have been incredibly helpful… three years ago, but the technology has changed, and now it only gets you partway there.

Which is why, when the pressure’s on and nobody can figure out what’s happening, we still end up going back to humans. Texting email friends. Comparing notes in Slack. Cornering mailbox providers in conference hallways. Asking if anyone else has seen some version of this before.

Because the real value in these spaces isn’t just information. It's the interpretation.

Eventually, you piece it together because someone, somewhere, has dealt with a version of your weird little email problem before... even if their version happened on a completely different email island somewhere in Fiji.

That’s why our community matters more than ever!

The internet has made email knowledge more accessible than ever… while simultaneously making it harder to know what to trust.

A lot of what people now believe about email comes from whatever gets repeated loudly enough (and often enough) online. And as AI-generated advice becomes more mainstream, accuracy will depend more and more on the quality of the human knowledge ecosystem underneath it.

(Yep. That's us.)

Of all the ways we connect, nothing quite compares to what happens when we're in person together.

Sure, the sessions are great. But the real stuff happens when the mic gets turned off. In the hallway between talks. At the bar after. Over a conference lunch that nobody eats because everyone's too busy talking.

That's where the people behind the blogs, posts, and talks you quote become actual humans — ones who are also figuring things out, also occasionally getting it wrong, also deeply and genuinely excited about the same nerdy things you are.

Those conversations don’t just solve problems. They usually leave you walking away with three new ideas, two new inside jokes, and at least one thing you now have to completely rethink.

If you haven't been to emailexpert's events, such as last month’s Festival of Email (including the Deliverability Summit and Sender Symposium), put them on your radar.

They’ve managed to create the kind of environment where people actually talk honestly about this stuff. Really Good Email’s UNSPAM event also took place last month — and from what I heard, it delivered exactly that kind of energy.

Of course, most of us can only get to so many events a year. Budget, bandwidth, geography... it all adds up. Which means a lot of incredibly smart people are missing out on the kinds of nuanced, real-time conversations that are genuinely hard to replicate through static content alone.

Which is exactly why extending those conversations virtually — regularly, accessibly, without a travel budget — matters so much. Not as a replacement for in-person. As a bridge. A way to keep the momentum going between the moments when we actually get to be in the same room.

It's the reason I'm currently partnering with emailexpert (among others) on how to close some of the gaps I see widening in good, trustworthy, practitioner-led information. It’s gonna take a whole lot more than one person with a newsletter.

The best email communities don't just give answers, they help you think.

So if you're not already plugged in, here's where to start:

EmailGeeks Slack is the closest thing our industry has to a staffed help desk — except instead of a ticketing system, you get actual humans who care about email as much as you do. It's free, it's searchable, and it's where some of the sharpest people in this space hang out and genuinely help each other. Even at 11 pm on a Tuesday, someone is probably awake and already in the channel.

But don’t stop there.

Some of the best industry relationships and conversations happen across communities like M3AAWG, emailexpert, CSA events, smaller peer groups, webinars, roundtables, and even the side conversations that spin out from them. Different spaces attract different perspectives… infrastructure folks, mailbox providers, lifecycle marketers, designers, developers, consultants, compliance people, platform operators.

Over time, you start realising the email world is less about “networking” and more about finding the corners of the industry where people are actually willing to compare notes honestly.

Not all email content is created equal. A lot of it is vendor-sponsored, out of date, or written by someone who has never actually been responsible for the health of a sending program.

Des's newsletter is an obvious starting point — you're already here. And he’s put together a great roundup of newsletters worth exploring if you wanna go deeper.

I’d also love for you to welcome my lil’ newsie, Send It Right, into your inbox — along with Spam Resource and Word to the Wise, both of which have been essential reading for as long as I can remember.

The most important thing is to pay attention to who you’re learning from. The filter I’d apply: does this person actually do the thing they’re writing about… or are they writing around it? Trust the doers.

I've put together a list of people I trust if you want a starting point.

Over time, you'll also start to notice who the people you trust are listening to, citing, and engaging with thoughtfully.

Doesn't mean blindly trusting every new voice that pops up. But it’s usually a pretty good signal that someone is worth paying attention to (even if you've never heard of them before).

And I think the industry is starting to recognise the need for something more intentional than that: shared repositories of vetted, practitioner-led content that surface based on nuance and lived experience rather than whoever optimised best for search that week. I've been having more and more conversations about exactly this lately, and it's not just a coincidence.

This is a big part of why I started running deliverability roundtables in the first place.

Not because I think I have all the answers. Honestly, most of the value comes from hearing how other practitioners are approaching the same problems from completely different angles, with different constraints, different mailbox provider quirks, and different internal pressures.

Sometimes you leave with an answer. Sometimes you leave realising you were asking the wrong question entirely.

But either way, it beats trying to untangle every weird email problem alone at 11:47 pm while squinting at contradictory blog posts (and questioning your career choices).

The groups are intentionally small and practitioner-focused, mostly because that’s where the good conversations tend to happen.

If that sounds useful, you can join the waitlist for future sessions.

However you go about it, find your people somewhere in this industry.

Because email gets a whole lot easier once you stop trying to figure everything out alone.

Your friend, Lauren 💌

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Ready to use this to make some new email friends, friends?

If you have any feedback or knowledge to share, click here! Oh, and please share this email with your friends and colleagues if you think they’ll find value over here.

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Your friend in email,

Des