Six New Songs, a Glossary, and a Smarter Site

A lot has happened since the last post. Six new songs, a brand-new glossary, topic landing pages, and a handful of improvements that make the site easier to navigate and understand. Here's everything.

Six new songs

We've been busy in the studio. Since May 1st, six new parodies have gone live — covering some of the most confusing and consequential topics in email deliverability.

Song	Original Artist	Topic
Doing Something Unholy	Sam Smith & Kim Petras	Reputation, list hygiene, authentication
Bullet With Spammy Wings	The Smashing Pumpkins	Blacklists, IP warmup, spam filters
Domain Reputation	Red Hot Chili Peppers	Domain warmup, complaint thresholds, engagement
Total Eclipse of the Chart	Bonnie Tyler	Open rates, Apple MPP, first-party data
Still SPF	Dr. Dre	SPF, DMARC, authentication
The Filter's Edge	AC/DC	Spam filters, bounces, reputation

Three worth highlighting

Doing Something Unholy takes Sam Smith and Kim Petras's hit and turns it into a cautionary tale about the sender who bought a list, skipped DMARC, ignored consent — and ended up on Spamhaus. It's catchy. The lesson is not subtle.

Total Eclipse of the Chart might be the most timely song we've written. Apple's Mail Privacy Protection, AI bot scans, and proxy preloading have made open rates close to meaningless for many senders. Bonnie Tyler's sweeping, desperate energy was made for this. The narrator watches their most-watched metric go dark and has to rebuild their understanding of what engagement even means anymore.

Still SPF is told entirely from SPF's point of view. RFC 7208 is still running MAIL FROM checks, still enforcing the 10-lookup limit, still breaking forwarded mail without SRS — and SPF wants you to know it's still relevant, even if DMARC gets all the credit. Dr. Dre's slow, assured swagger was the only possible vehicle for this.

Every song includes full lyrics, a production breakdown, and a deliverability best practices checklist.

A full deliverability glossary

The Glossary is now live — 39 terms, from BIMI to Zombie Addresses. Every entry explains the concept in plain language, with no assumed expertise.

What makes it more than a list: throughout the site, glossary terms are now automatically linked wherever they appear in song production notes and best practices. Read about SPF alignment in a song's best practices section and you'll see the term link straight to its definition. It's a small thing that makes a real difference when you're learning.

The glossary is also fully indexed — Google sees it as a structured vocabulary, which means it surfaces in search when people look up these terms.

Topic landing pages

Every topic in the Songbook now has its own page — Authentication, Reputation, DMARC, and so on.

If you're researching a specific area of deliverability, you can now go straight to the topic and see every song that covers it, without filtering through the full songbook. These pages also help people find the site when searching for educational content on specific deliverability topics.

Smaller improvements

The hero video title is now a link. The latest song plays in the homepage hero — you can now click the title to go straight to the song page. Simple, but it should have always been there.

Better structured data throughout. Song pages with YouTube videos now include VideoObject schema, which helps Google understand and index the content correctly. The homepage has WebSite schema for accurate site name recognition. These are invisible improvements that pay off in search.

A custom 404 page. If you end up somewhere that doesn't exist, you'll now land on a page that actually helps — links to the songbook, the glossary, recent songs.

Where we are

138 songs and counting. The Songbook now covers essentially every major deliverability topic — spam filters, authentication, warmup, reputation, list hygiene, engagement, compliance, and more — across a genuinely absurd range of genres.

If you want to keep up without checking back manually, The Inbox Beat delivers one song and one lesson every Thursday.

👉 Browse the Songbook