Hard Bounces vs Soft: What Each One Costs You
Hard and soft bounces explained in plain English, and why your sender reputation pays for every one of them.
Services
Flexible email services to fit your need and budget
Free monitoring and fixed-scope audits when something's broken. Ongoing implementation and management when you'd rather focus on running your business. No contracts, cancel any time.
Six ways to work with me
Fixed price, fixed scope. If it is not listed, the custom tier covers it.
Campaign Management
PoA monthly or project
End-to-end campaign work: strategy, platform setup, sends and landing pages. Your campaigns built and run by someone who has done it at production scale for two decades.
- Campaign strategy, planning and audience segmentation
- Platform setup: sends, segments, templates and automations
- Landing pages and sign-up funnels built and wired
- Authentication and deliverability handled from day one
- Recurring or project-based, scoped to your requirements
Dmarcus
£0+ free tier, £49/mo premium
DMARC report monitoring for your domain, in plain English. Start free with weekly summaries, step up to daily monitoring with alerts when something changes.
- Free tier: weekly DMARC summary — who is sending as you, what passes
- Spot spoofing attempts and authentication breaks early
- Premium tier: daily monitoring with alerts on new senders and breaks
- Human review when something needs judgement, not just parsing
- No card to start, no lock-in to upgrade
Wingman
£99 per month
Direct WhatsApp access to an experienced email infrastructure consultant. Advice, not implementation — the decisions stay yours.
- Ask anything on WhatsApp about your sending, authentication or platform
- Advice and guidance only — I do not log in and change your systems
- Priority replies — typically same working day
- Limited places — advice quality depends on my availability, so capacity is capped
Authentication Audit
£149 one-off
Full diagnostic of your SPF, DKIM and DMARC. What is published, what passes, what fails, and why.
- SPF, DKIM and DMARC records examined live against public DNS
- Lookup budget calculated and reported
- Plain-English summary of what is broken and what it costs you
- Prioritised remediation plan you can execute yourself
Deliverability Rescue
£249 one-off
Your email is going to spam and you do not know why. I diagnose it and fix it.
- Complete investigation across all three layers
- Authentication records aligned and published for you
- Platform configuration corrected where required
- Verification tests proving the result
Custom Services
PoA ongoing
Hands-on consulting and implementation work scoped to your requirements. Priced on application.
- Scoped engagements with defined deliverables and timelines
- Configuration work performed for you, not just advised on
- Full quote provided before any commitment
Pricing shown is indicative. Confirm the current structure before engaging.
Project & implementation work
The things that need building, not diagnosing — scoped, quoted and delivered.
DMARC enforcement programme
Move from p=none to p=reject safely over weeks, with monitoring gates at each stage. You learn what normal looks like before you enforce, so legitimate senders do not get blocked on the first day.
IP & domain reputation strategy
Warm-up plans, dedicated vs shared IP decisions, subdomain architecture. Two decades of sender experience applied to your volumes, your providers and your tolerance for risk.
Authentication implementation
SPF, DKIM and DMARC built correctly from the start, across your sending platforms, with DMARC monitoring until enforcement is safe.
Migrations & platform setup
Moving house — between ESPs or into a self-hosted setup. Segments, templates, automations and authentication carried over and verified.
Managed Mautic hosting
Your own self-hosted marketing automation, on infrastructure I administer. Updates, monitoring, deliverability and authentication maintained — without you running a server.
Marketing automation architecture
Automation flows, drip campaigns and list strategy designed by someone who has run these systems in production for two decades — not just configured them.
How I serve every client
A defined process, agreed before anything changes — the same discipline for a one-off audit, a project, or ongoing work.
Survey — consultation & investigation
We start with a conversation, then a technical survey of your current setup: DNS, authentication records, sending platforms, list hygiene, and what you are trying to achieve. No proposals before diagnosis.
Explain — findings in plain English
You receive a clear picture of what is wrong, what it is costing you, and what fixing it involves. Scope and price are agreed before any changes are made.
Remediate — implementation
The agreed work, done properly: systems configured, records aligned, deliverability improved. Changes documented as they are made.
Verify — proof it works
Tests and reports demonstrating the result — working systems, passing checks, measurable improvement. You see the evidence, not just my word.
Engage — ongoing relationship
Where it makes sense: monitoring, maintenance and defined response windows, so problems are caught before they cost you.
Not sure which fits?
Describe the problem — I will tell you which level of help it actually needs.
From the blog
View all posts »Straightforward guides and updates on authentication, deliverability and overall strategy.
The DMARC Report Reading Checklist: What to Look At First
Aggregate reports arrive as unreadable XML. This is a guide to parsing and understanding those files. The fields that matter and the ones to ignore, plus, what each finding means strategically.
IP Warm-Up: Start Sending Without Torching Your Reputation
New sending infrastructure has no reputation, which receiving servers treat with suspicion. This guide is the staged process for building reputation safely, and the mistakes that can burn it in week one.
Dead Addresses: Worse Than No List at All
Bigger list, more sends. That used to be the whole logic of email marketing. It no longer works like that. How to prune a list, when to do it, and why keeping dead addresses hurts you.