Your emails are going to spam. Your open rates are tanking. And that list you bought? It's about to get your account shut down.

Welcome to 2026, where email marketing got a whole lot more complicated—and a whole lot more important.

Melissa Seideman didn't plan to become an email marketing expert. She was a high school history teacher for 15 years, selling curriculum online to make extra money because daycare was too expensive. Then something happened: She started sending emails. Really good emails. The kind that made a couple thousand dollars per send.

Other teachers noticed. They started asking: "What are you doing that I'm not doing?"

Fast forward to today: Melissa runs Not Another VA with a team of eight (all moms, mostly former or current teachers), managing email marketing for 30+ clients across wildly different industries—curriculum sellers, therapists, anxiety coaches, HVAC companies, brick-and-mortar businesses, and digital shops.

And she's seen it all: accounts shut down for breaking the new rules, clients losing entire lists overnight, open rates plummeting from 80% to 20% after switching to AI-written emails.

In this conversation, Melissa reveals:

The New Email Rules (Ignore Them at Your Peril):

1. Paid domain emails are mandatory (no more gmail.com or yahoo.com)
2. Domain verification is non-negotiable (you must own your business domain)
3. List warming is essential (even if you switch platforms or get a new domain)
4. Double opt-in protects you (and keeps your deliverability intact)

The Client Who Didn't Listen: One client ignored Melissa's warnings and kept sending emails without following the new regulations. Result? Every single email landed in spam with a warning: "This is not a safe sender." Her sender reputation was destroyed.

The 100K Email Disaster: Another client sent emails to 100,000 people without warming up her domain. The email provider shut down her account immediately. She lost everything—her entire list, gone.

The AI Email Experiment That Failed: A client left Melissa after three years to use AI for emails. Her open rates dropped from 80% to 20% overnight. Why? The emails didn't sound human. They were too polished, too obvious, too robotic. People could tell.

What Actually Works:

1. Consistency matters more than frequency (one email/month consistently beats sporadic bursts)
2. Size doesn't matter (Melissa has a client with 3,000 people who made $200K in 4 years)
3. Engagement beats volume (80% open rate, 15% click rate = consistent weekly sales)
4. Human touch is irreplaceable (AI can enhance, but it can't replicate your stories, your voice, your relationships)

The $4,000 Tiny List Win: Lindsay shares a client story: A Christmas decorator with just 500 people on her list (built organically over 2-3 years) sent one simple email per week during her season. Total revenue: nearly $4,000. Small list. High engagement. Real results.

The Email Sending Domain Hack: Melissa and Lindsay dive into a technical workaround most...