Delivering to Gmail

Gmail is a challenge for even the best senders these days.
With the recent Gmail changes there isn’t any clear fix to getting open rates or inbox delivery back up. Some of it depends on what is causing Gmail to filter the mail. Changing subject lines, from name, from address may get mail back to the inbox in the short term, but it only works until the filters catch up.
What I am seeing, across a number of clients, is that Gmail is doing a lot of content reputation and that content reputation gets spread across senders of that content.  That means you want to look at who is sending any mail on your behalf (mentioning your domain or pointing at your website) and their practices. If they have poor practices, then it can reflect badly on you and result in filtering.
From what I’ve seen, these are very deliberate filtering decisions by Google. And it’s making mail a lot harder for many, many senders. But I think it is, unfortunately, the new reality.

Role accounts, ESPs and commercial email
Outlook 365 having a bad day

Related Posts

Spamhaus rising?

Ken has a good article talking about how many ESPs have tightened their standards recently and are really hounding their customers to stop sending mail recipients don’t want and don’t like. Ken credits much of this change to Spamhaus and their new tools.

Read More

The challenge of Gmail

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

Read More

Are the new Gmail ads email?

I’ve seen lots of opinions over the last few weeks about whether or not the new ads in the Gmail promotions tab are email or not.

Read More