LONDON — For decades, the global email marketing industry has functioned as a house divided against itself. On one side sit the creative marketers, brand strategists, and customer relationship management (CRM) professionals who obsess over messaging, personalization, and conversion rates. On the other side reside the deliverability engineers, infrastructure architects, and security gatekeepers who manage IP warming, blocklists, and mailbox provider (MBP) compliance.
For the rest of the year, these two factions rarely communicate except through mutual frustration—marketers complaining that strict technical barriers are killing their campaigns, and engineers rolling their eyes at poorly targeted, spammy content that compromises server reputations.
Now, a new event aims to shatter these operational silos. The emailexpert Forum is coming to London for its inaugural United Kingdom edition on November 16 and 17. Eschewing the sterile, corporate atmosphere of traditional hotel ballrooms, the event has secured a venue with architectural grandeur and historical weight: St Mary’s Marylebone, a magnificent Grade I listed church designed by Sir Robert Smirke and completed in 1824.
With capacity strictly capped at around 250 attendees to preserve intimacy and high-level debate, more than half of the tickets have already been claimed. Organizers have deliberately curated a programme designed not to stroke egos, but to provoke hard questions, tackle uncomfortable truths, and force commercial marketers and technical gatekeepers into the same room to hash out the future of the inbox.
Main Facts: What, Where, and Who
The emailexpert Forum is structured around a unique twin-track format titled "The Message and The Machine." Rather than forcing delegates to choose between technical deep dives and commercial strategies, the conference bridges the gap by running two parallel stages under one historic roof.
- The Message (Upstairs in the Great Hall): This track addresses marketing, CRM, customer lifecycle strategies, and the commercial realities of surviving in a crowded inbox.
- The Machine (Downstairs in the Undercroft): This track focuses squarely on deliverability, server infrastructure, global authentication standards, and cybersecurity.
A single ticket grants full access to both floors. Organizers anticipate heavy traffic on the stairs as delegates bounce between technical troubleshooting and creative campaign design.
Unlike massive, commercialized marketing expos that pull in thousands of attendees—where networking is often reduced to hurried exchanges near overpriced coffee stations—the emailexpert Forum deliberately limits its footprint. Capped at roughly a tenth of the size of standard London marketing conferences, the venue ensures that when an attendee disagrees with a speaker, they can easily track them down after the session and make their case.
The event’s financial backing comes from industry heavyweights. Zeta Global and GreenArrow Email serve as headline sponsors, supported by partners including Bouncer, KumoMTA, Netcore Cloud, and Halon. Crucially, organizers have maintained a strict firewall between sponsorships and content. Open submissions for speaking slots have closed, and the same stringent tests of relevance, originality, and intellectual rigor have been applied to sponsors, advisors, and first-time speakers alike. Promotional moments are kept strictly brief and entirely separate from core debates.
Chronology and Schedule of Events
The 2024 London Forum is structured as an immersive multi-day experience, beginning well before the keynote addresses and extending past the closing remarks.
- Sunday, November 15: Early arrivals and delegates gather for the official Welcome Drinks, setting the stage for networking ahead of the intensive sessions.
- Monday, November 16 (Day One): The main conference opens at St Mary’s Marylebone. Keynotes and dual-track panel debates run throughout the day. Monday evening features an extended Happy Hour running until 19:30, offering attendees ample time to decompress and debate the day’s talking points.
- Tuesday, November 17 (Day Two): The second full day of intensive discussions across The Message and The Machine stages. The formal conference concludes on Tuesday evening with the exclusive Gala dinner (ticketed separately).
- Wednesday, November 18: Optional post-event activities and local networking excursions are available for attendees remaining in London.
Registration is currently open via the official event portal. Full delegate passes are priced at £725 plus VAT, which includes entry to both days, access to both stages, full lunch and refreshments, and the Monday evening reception. Registered emailexpert community members are eligible for exclusive discounts. Organizers have warned that once standard passes sell out, any remaining late-release tickets will exclude lunch—a critical loss for a long-form, two-day collaborative event.
Supporting Data and Industry Context
The urgency behind the emailexpert Forum stems from a rapidly shifting digital landscape where the rules of inbox placement, data privacy, and consumer attention are being rewritten daily.
Email remains one of the highest-yielding channels in digital marketing, yet it is under siege from multiple directions:
- The Blocklist Battleground: The proliferation of unsolicited commercial outreach has forced inbox providers and anti-abuse networks to tighten restrictions aggressively.
- The Measurement Crisis: Privacy legislation, Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection (MPP), and automated bot traffic have rendered traditional metrics—most notably the open rate—largely unreliable.
- The Rise of Autonomous Filtering: Mailbox providers are increasingly deploying artificial intelligence to automatically summarize, sort, and prioritize incoming mail, stripping brands of direct control over how their messages appear to end users.
These pressures have created an environment of finger-pointing. When campaign performance dips, marketing teams point the finger at technical infrastructure and claim deliverability is failing. Conversely, systems administrators point right back, arguing that poor audience segmentation, low-quality data collection, and uninspired messaging are driving users to hit the "Report Spam" button.
By bringing together anti-abuse experts, mailbox providers, ESP executives, and veteran copywriters into a historic 200-year-old church, the emailexpert Forum provides a neutral space to address these systemic friction points head-on.
Official Responses and Contentious Debates
The conference programme has been deliberately constructed around unresolved industry controversies. Rather than featuring polite, scripted slide presentations, the sessions are designed to provoke friction and debate. Several high-profile industry figures have confirmed their attendance to tackle the sector’s most divisive topics:
1. Cold Email: Legitimate Channel or Organized Spam?
Is cold email a viable, high-performance B2B sales tool, or is it simply spam dressed up with a sales target? This question will take center stage with the participation of Raymond Dijkxhoorn, co-founder of SURBL and operator of a major blocklist, alongside representatives from Spamhaus and Yahoo. Defenders of cold outreach will have to justify their practices directly to the gatekeepers and defenders of network hygiene. Organizers expect this to be one of the most volatile and illuminating hours of the two-day event.
2. Is Deliverability Simply an Excuse for Bad Marketing?
When key performance indicators plummet, technical teams are often handed the blame for poor inbox placement. However, critics argue that the underlying culprit is frequently lazy, irrelevant, or low-quality messaging. Laura Atkins, Steve Atkins, and John Peters of Marigold bring decades of combined experience and notoriously unfiltered opinions to this debate.
3. The Death of Meaningful Email Measurement
With opens compromised by automated fetchers and clicks skewed by bot activity, attribution has become a guessing game dependent on who controls the spreadsheet. Kath Pay and Chad S. White of Zeta Global will lead the charge in examining how brands can regain clarity and accuracy in performance tracking.
4. The Evolving Role of the ESP
Should an Email Service Provider (ESP) remain a "dumb pipe" that simply transmits data from point A to point B, or must platforms actively filter, optimize, and enforce compliance? Mike Hillyer and David Harris are among the industry veterans slated to debate where platform responsibility ends and user accountability begins.
5. AI in the Inbox and Strategic Overload
As artificial intelligence reshapes email consumption, Marcel Becker and David Finger will explore whether AI summaries and automated prioritisation help recipients manage their day or actively undermine brand visibility. Additional sessions will examine the utility of Customer Data Platforms (CDPs), optimal sending frequencies featuring a potential clash between Dela Quist and Kath Pay, and publisher perspectives from Sarah Ebner of the Financial Times.
Implications for the Future of Email
The implications of the London Forum extend far beyond two days of debate in Marylebone. As regulatory scrutiny tightens, privacy frameworks evolve, and mailbox providers rely increasingly on machine learning algorithms to curate human attention, the traditional playbook for email marketing is obsolete.
By forcing marketers and engineers into the same room, the emailexpert Forum is modeling a necessary evolution in how digital communication businesses operate. Marketers must become more literate in the technical constraints of infrastructure and deliverability, while engineers must develop a deeper appreciation for commercial viability and audience engagement.
For professionals willing to step out of their operational echo chambers, face their critics, and engage in unvarnished industry debate, St Mary’s Marylebone on November 16 and 17 offers an unmatched opportunity. In an industry defined by digital distance, bringing people face-to-face in a 200-year-old church may be precisely the intervention the inbox needs.
Disclosure: emailexpert is the primary organizer of the Forum. The sponsors referenced in this report are commercial partners of emailexpert.
