Daily Morning Briefing — October 21, 2026 Edition: Email Marketing & Automation

Masthead deck. Salesforce agreed to buy Braze for $5.66 billion in cash, and the market immediately re-priced every other independent email and engagement vendor: Klaviyo jumped 11.9% and Braze itself closed 52% higher. The counterweight is on the sending side, where a high-volume mailer reported Gmail placement collapsing across three different ESPs on the same day.

Coverage window: 2026-10-20T05:23:28Z to 2026-10-21T05:23:28Z (UTC). Local edition time: Europe/Kiev, UTC+3 (EEST). Every item carries an explicit timestamp; anything that could not be placed inside the window was dropped.

At a glance

1. Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Braze for approximately $5.66 billion in enterprise value, paying $47.50 per share in cash — a 58% premium to Monday's close — with the deal expected to close in Salesforce's fiscal 2028 (Salesforce, 20 Oct 2026).
2. The read-across was instant and violent: Klaviyo gained 11.9% to $19.61, Braze closed up 52%, and Salesforce's own stock fell as investors balked at the price (GuruFocus, 20 Oct 2026, Yahoo Finance, 20 Oct 2026, MarketWatch, 20 Oct 2026).
3. A sender pushing 400,000 to 500,000 emails a day reported CTR near zero and inbox-to-spam flipping across Brevo, Mailjet and Mailgun simultaneously on 20 October, with SPF, DKIM and DMARC all passing (r/Emailmarketing, 2026-10-20 15:25 UTC).
4. Marc Lou's MailCheap launch drew 1.5 million views and, by one critic's count, 23 active customers, turning a product launch into a public argument about whether switching ESPs is cheap or structurally expensive (@JMatthewMcGarry, 2026-10-21 01:28 UTC, @faborio, 2026-10-20 17:25 UTC).