Holiday inbox overload, a free path to a BIMI logo, and email leads retail-media activation
Four developments to inspect this week: what 1,000 shoppers told Validity about holiday email volume and trust, a free tool that removes the hard part of earning a BIMI logo, email's place at the top of retail-media activation, and an independent route to deliverability help.
Coverage window: September 30, 2026 at 10:16 through October 2, 2026 at 10:15 (UTC+02:00). The window runs two days, because the previous issue went out on Wednesday and the schedule's next slot is Friday. It holds four developments. The first is the season's own research, because the Q4 sending calendar is being locked now. The second is a free tool for the last step of email authentication. The third is a study that puts email at the top of how advertisers activate a retail-media audience. The fourth is a smaller practitioner note, kept last because it is the least urgent.
Holiday shoppers are already telling brands to slow down
What changed
Validity, the email data and deliverability company that owns Litmus, published a Holiday 2026 Consumer Survey on September 29, drawing on 1,000 consumers, and MediaPost's Email Insider column wrote it up on September 30. 12
Trust leads the findings. Almost a quarter of the consumers polled say the volume of holiday email makes them distrust brands, and that share rises to nearly half among Gen Z shoppers. 1 Asked what decides whether they open a message, 47% named trust, ahead of relevance at 41% and the value spelled out in the subject line at 27%. 1
Most shoppers do notice the extra mail. For Q4, 41% say the volume matches the rest of the year, 24% say they get somewhat more, and 20% say significantly more — so 44% report a heavier inbox. 1 The cost lands two ways. In past holiday seasons, 36% missed, deleted, or overlooked an important non-promotional email — a bill, a shipping notice, an account alert — because of the clutter, and 33% say too many messages in a day or week would push them to unsubscribe. 1
What shoppers want instead is a slower cadence and more control. A quarter prefer a weekly email from a brand, 21% want daily mail, and 21% want to hear from a brand every two to three days; 16% want messages only for major sales, and 11% would rather receive no holiday promotions at all. 1 On timing, 28% welcome holiday email later in October, 21% in early October, 24% in early November, and 14% after Thanksgiving; 2% want December only. 1
Validity's senior vice president of marketing, Cynthia Price, framed the volume as a shared problem. "Consumers are drawing a clear line between brands that respect their attention and brands that don't," she said. "That line doesn't move for who's sending." 1
Why it matters
Every sender's Q4 plan pulls the same lever — more sends, closer together — and this survey prices that lever. The readers who feel the overload first are the ones who decide whether a shipping notice gets seen and whether a promotional message is marked as spam, and a spam complaint carries more weight against a sender's reputation than an unsubscribe does. 1
The survey also tells non-retail senders that the season reaches them. Validity says B2B, SaaS, and finance brands feel the same crowded inbox even when their own offers have nothing to do with the holidays, because the clutter around their messages belongs to other senders. 2
The frequency preference is the concrete part. Roughly a third of shoppers put themselves at daily or every-two-to-three-days, and a quarter want weekly mail, so a program built on daily holiday sends is betting that its best customers are in the third of the audience that wants them. The preference tools the survey lists — a snooze, category subscriptions, a frequency preference centre — all let a subscriber step down without leaving. 1
Checks before acting
- Compare the holiday cadence you have planned against the split shoppers gave: 25% weekly, 21% daily, 21% every two to three days. If your plan sends daily to everyone, that is the gap to justify.
- Stand up a temporary opt-down or snooze before the season starts; 22% asked for one, and it keeps a subscriber who would otherwise unsubscribe.
- Offer category subscriptions or a frequency preference centre; 20% and 18% respectively asked for them.
- Put a seasonal send calendar beside the survey's timing curve — most shoppers who want holiday mail want it later in October, not in December. 1
A free tool arrives for the last step of email authentication
What changed
Mailgun, the transactional email provider, published a webinar recap on October 1 with Red Sift, an email security company, and the two firms' engineers walked through SPF, DKIM, and DMARC before demonstrating a new Red Sift tool. 3
The hard number in the recap is enforcement. Only about 7% of organisations have reached full DMARC enforcement — quarantine or reject at 100% — while the other 93% sit at
p=none, collecting reports and blocking nothing. 3 DMARC, short for Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance, turns SPF and DKIM into a published policy with three settings: p=none only reports; p=quarantine sends messages that fail authentication to spam; p=reject blocks them. 3Enforcement is the doorway to BIMI, Brand Indicators for Message Identification, which places a brand's logo next to its messages in supporting inboxes. 3 Getting a logo in requires a certificate proving the sender has the rights to it: a Common Mark Certificate (CMC), about $1,000 a year for a first domain and roughly $450 for each additional domain on the same logo, or a Verified Mark Certificate (VMC) for a trademarked mark. 3
Red Sift's contribution is a free tool called BIMI Maker, live now, that collapses the preparation work: it converts a logo into the SVG format BIMI expects, previews it in light mode, dark mode, and the rounded-square and circle crops different inbox apps use, verifies domain and logo ownership, and runs a readiness check before the certificate application. 34 Red Sift's own research, cited in the recap, found that a BIMI-verified logo lifted brand recall 44%, open rates 39%, and purchase intent 32% against a send with no logo. 3
Why it matters
Authentication has two halves, and most senders have finished only the first. Publishing SPF and DKIM records makes a message provable; a DMARC policy decides what a mailbox provider does when the proof fails. Sitting at
p=none leaves the decision unmade, and the 7% figure says that is where nearly everyone is. 3The BIMI Maker release matters for cost and time rather than for authentication itself. The certificate still costs money and still depends on enforcement, but the fiddly steps — formatting a logo as SVG, proving ownership, checking how it crops — are where senders stall, and a free tool that previews the logo in the inbox's own shapes removes the guesswork. 3 With enforcement at 7%, a logo beside the message is still rare enough to stand out. 3
Checks before acting
- Inventory every system that sends from your domain before you touch the policy — your ESP, your CRM, and the tools nobody remembers. The recap's own example is an office printer still sending from a 2003 configuration, found only once someone read the DMARC reports. 3
- Move in order: leave the policy at
p=nonelong enough to collect reports, fix or remove the SPF and DKIM records of senders that should not exist, then step top=quarantineas a safety net, and only then considerp=reject. 3 - Test your logo in BIMI Maker before buying a certificate, and confirm with your legal team that the mark you want to display is one you can certify. 4
Email sits at the top of how advertisers activate a retail-media audience
What changed
GrowthLoop, a marketing data company, published a study it calls the Commerce Media Investment Index, conducted by the research firm Ascend2, and MediaPost's Email Insider column covered it on October 1. 5 The study polled 291 marketing professionals in the United States and Canada during August 2026 who work with retail media networks or commerce media networks — the advertising businesses that retailers and marketplaces run on their own sites and audiences. 5
The spending picture is committed. Of the advertisers surveyed, 76% use retail media networks and 65% use commerce media networks; 73% put at least 15% of their digital ad budget there, and 30% put 29% or more; 85% plan to increase that spending in the next 12 months. 5
Email is the channel those campaigns reach the audience through. Asked which activation channels they use, 58% named email — ahead of on-site display and on-site search at 46% each, off-site social at 43%, in-store digital screens and direct mail at 38% each, SMS and push notifications at 34%, non-digital in-store display at 32%, off-site video and connected TV at 28%, and off-site programmatic display at 25%. 5
The dissatisfaction sits in measurement. Asked what causes them to cut or pause a retail-media investment, 36% said cost relative to other channels, 32% said difficulty proving return on investment, 30% said limits in audience availability or quality, 30% said measurement and attribution gaps, 29% said internal resource constraints, and 27% each said slow audience activation and an inconsistent experience across partners. 5 Only 40% are confident in the incrementality measurement their partners provide, and 38% each want faster access to results, sales-lift and new-customer reporting, and consistent metrics across partners. 5 The full study is published by GrowthLoop. 6
Why it matters
The list an email team maintains is the asset that these campaigns activate, so a retail-media budget that is growing 12 months out is also demand on the email channel and on the customer data behind it. When 58% of advertisers name email as the channel they activate through, the email team is no longer only a sender; it becomes a supplier to the media plan. 5
The friction the study finds is about proving value, not about access to the channel. Advertisers who cannot show incrementality from their partners will push that demand upstream, toward whoever holds the audience and can produce a measurable result — which is the email team's list and its reporting. 5
One limit on the finding: the study surveys the buyers, so it reports what advertisers want to do with email, and says nothing about what the email program can safely deliver. 5
Checks before acting
- Expect requests to make your email audience available inside a retail-media or commerce-media campaign. Decide in advance who owns consent and suppression when your list is used that way. 5
- Work out now what measurement you can supply from email — send, click, and conversion by audience — and which attribution questions you will have to decline. 5
An independent deliverability option, named
What changed
Spam Resource, the deliverability blog written by Al Iverson, published a post on September 30 recommending Jennifer Nespola Lantz, a deliverability specialist he worked with at the email verification firm Kickbox, for consulting work through her new site at emaildelivbyjen.com. 78
The post lists the work she takes on: deliverability audits and strategy; domain and IP reputation repair; getting mail out of the spam folder; IP and domain warming; authentication across DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and BIMI; analysis of SMTP rejections and bounces; mailbox-provider sender requirements; blocklist remediation; and list-unsubscribe and list hygiene practice. 7
Why it matters
Deliverability expertise usually arrives bundled inside an ESP's support, and a sender whose problem sits between systems — a lead-scoring tool sending through the corporate domain, a domain whose reputation fell after a vendor's mistake — has had few places to take it. A named independent consultant is one of those places. 7
The service list also works as a diagnostic checklist. A sender whose mail is landing in spam can compare the symptoms against the list — reputation, warming, authentication, bounce analysis, blocklists — and see which of those their own team has already ruled out. 7
Checks before acting
- If your Q4 plan depends on inbox placement you cannot currently explain, write down your specific failure — which mailbox provider, which stream, which date — before you brief anyone on it; it is the first thing any audit needs.
- Keep internal ownership of your authentication records and list hygiene. A consultant can find the fault; changing the process stays with your team. 7
Next audit
Two of this issue's items point at the same date on the calendar. Before the holiday sends lock, set the cadence you can defend against the survey's frequency split, and inventory every system sending from your domain so that the DMARC move — reports at
p=none, then quarantine, then reject — is made once and correctly rather than under Q4 pressure. The other two are groundwork: a free way to preview your BIMI logo, and a name to call if the inbox problem outgrows what your team can diagnose alone.References
- 1
- 2
- 3
- 4BIMI Maker
redsift.com
- 5
- 6The Commerce Media Investment Index
growthloop.com
- 7Need Inbox Help? Ask Jen!
spamresource.com
- 8Jennifer Nespola Lantz — deliverability consulting
emaildelivbyjen.com
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