Platform
Advisory.
You added email sending to your product. Congratulations, you're running an email platform now, and the blocklists don't care that it was supposed to be a handful of little features. You need to stand up the compliance infrastructure to run email sending safely.
There's a pattern.
One bad customer poisons the pool.
A customer imports a purchased list. Complaints spike. Your shared IPs land on Spamhaus. Every other customer on that pool stops delivering too, and your support queue lights up with people whose mail suddenly stopped working through no fault of their own.
No one vetted the account.
Signup is friction, so the acceptable use policy lives on a page nobody reads. Anyone can create an account and start sending the same day, and your first signal that someone is abusing the product is usually a blocklist listing.
Complaints land in a dead inbox.
Mailbox providers send abuse reports and feedback loop messages to addresses you may not have configured, and if you did configure them, nobody owns the queue. Oops.
The product makes bad sending easy.
You allow bulk list imports with no validation. Unsubscribe sits 3 clicks and a login deep. Your customers can send from a subdomain of your root. Every one of those is a decision that leads to worse deliverability for the whole platform.
Pick the one that matches where you are.
You can work with me in 3 ways depending on your stage, from a fixed-fee review before you ship to ongoing fractional access as the platform scales.
Before you ship
Launch Readiness Review
This is for product and engineering teams about to ship email sending inside their product.
I review your sending architecture, your draft acceptable use policy, your product guardrails, and your planned abuse response. You get a prioritized findings document and a short list of the specific changes that will save you the most pain post-launch. The review takes 2 to 3 weeks of focused work.
Scope a reviewFirst 90 days post-launch
Build-Out Project
This is for platforms that already shipped sending and now need the compliance infrastructure to run it safely.
I stand up your acceptable use policy, customer vetting workflow, abuse desk, complaint handling, feedback loop ingestion, enforcement playbook, and incident procedures from scratch. By the end of the engagement you have a documented program your team can run without me.
Scope a build-outOn call as you scale
Advisory Retainer
This is for platforms that want senior deliverability thinking showing up in their regular planning cadence.
You get monthly fractional access. I sit in on the stand-ups that matter, review product changes before they ship, handle escalations when a mailbox provider or blocklist operator starts asking questions, and keep the policy and procedures up to date as the product evolves.
Talk retainerI've done this before.
- •Pardot's compliance function
- •SocketLabs' enterprise sending platform
- •Salesforce Marketing Cloud's compliance function
Tell me where you are in the build.
15 minutes on the phone and I can tell you what is going to bite you first.
I'm Skyler Holobach.
I spent 7 years at Salesforce building compliance and trust infrastructure for one of the largest email senders in the world. During that stretch, I was the escalation point for ISP abuse desks and Spamhaus, which means I have spent years working the exact conversations your ESP is now trying to have on your behalf.
I speak at M3AAWG and Unspam, I sit on the board of Women of Email, and I have written the remediation cases that get senders unlisted. Threadsmith Group is where I bring that work directly to companies whose email programs have gone sideways.
When your program is broken and the clock is running, I'm the person you want reading the headers, writing the remediation case, and translating between your team and your ESP's compliance desk.
A ground rule.
I don't work with cold outreach platforms or any product whose revenue model depends on sending unsolicited email. I've spent years cleaning up the mess those platforms make for every honest sender who shares an IP neighborhood with them. I'm not going to help build another one.