Gmail and the bulk folder

Earlier this week Gmail announced they were providing reasons for why they delivered a particular mail to the bulk folder. I’m sure a lot of senders are rejoicing over the clear feedback. After all this is exactly what they’ve been asking for “tell us why you’re filtering our mail and we’ll fix it.”
I am not sure, however, that this is going to help the majority of senders seeing mail going to the bulk folder. On the Gmail support pages, they list a number of the explanations they’re be providing.

  • Phishing scams
  • Messages from an unconfirmed sender
  • Messages you sent to Spam
  • Similarity to suspicious messages
  • Administrator-set policies

Similarity to suspicious messages is a polite way of saying “this mail looks like spam.” Gmail does provide a few more details for this classification.

Gmail uses automated spam detection systems to analyze patterns and predict what types of messages are fraudulent or potentially harmful. Here are just a few of the things our system considers when marking a message as spam:

  • Content that’s usually associated with spam such as mature content and “get rich quick” schemes
  • Messages that falsely appear to be a “bounced message” response (a system-generated email that you might automatically get after sending a message that can’t be delivered such as a message sent to an invalid email address)
  • Messages sent from accounts or IP addresses that have sent other spam messages
  • Behavior of other Gmail users, such as many people reporting spam from a particular sender
  • Similarity to other spam or phishing messages based on a combination of things like subject matter, elements like spelling and formatting, and suspicious attachments
  • A difference between your Gmail language preference and the language used in the message

Hopefully this will help senders diagnose the reasons for bulk foldering at Gmail. Given how tight their filters have gotten over the last 6 months, it’s certainly something more and more of us have to deal with.

Related Posts

Content, trigger words and subject lines

There’s been quite a bit of traffic on twitter this afternoon about a recent blog post by Hubspot identifying trigger words senders should avoid in an email subject line. A number of email experts are assuring the world that content doesn’t matter and are arguing on twitter and in the post comments that no one will block an email because those words are in the subject line.
As usually, I think everyone else is a little bit right and a little bit wrong.
The words and phrases posted by Hubspot are pulled out of the Spamassassin rule set. Using those words or exact phrases will cause a spam score to go up, sometimes by a little (0.5 points) and sometimes by a lot (3+ points). Most spamassassin installations consider anything with more than 5 points to be spam so a 3 point score for a subject line may cause mail to be filtered.
The folks who are outraged at the blog post, though, don’t seem to have read the article very closely. Hubspot doesn’t actually say that using trigger words will get mail blocked. What they say is a lot more reasonable than that.

Read More

Court rules blogger is not a journalist

Last week a federal judge ruled a blogger, Crystal Cox, was not a journalist and not subject to first amendment protections. I haven’t been following the case very closely, but was a little concerned about the precedent and the liability for people like me who blog.
Reading some of the articles on the case, though, I’m less worried. This isn’t a blogger making some statements. Instead, Ms. Cox acted more like a stalker and harasser than a reporter. The judge even concluded that had she been granted protection as a journalist it was unlikely she could prevail as there was little factual basis for her statements.
Others have done better summaries of the case and the effect and I encourage everyone to read them.
Seattle Weekly
New York Times
Ars Technica
Forbes

I also discourage folks from applying this ruling to all bloggers. It’s not clear she was doing anything journalistic. I did find it interesting that some of her techniques to ruin the lawyer’s search results were defined as Search Engine Optimization. I’ve long thought SEO was akin to spam: say something often enough in enough places and you start to dominate the conversation. Not because you have anything useful to say, but because no one can get an idea in otherwise.

Read More

Spamming ESPs

In my mailbox there is a definite uptick in spam from ESPs advertising their services.
Today’s email was from a company that has the following in their anti-spam policy:

Read More