Thoughts on Gmail filtering

Gmail has some extremely complex filters. They’re machine learning based and measure hundreds of things about incoming mail. The filters are continually adjusting to changes and updating how they treat specific mail.
One consequence of continually adjusting machine learning filters is that filtering is not static. What passes to the inbox now, may not pass in a couple hours.
One of the other challenges with Gmail filters is that they look at all the mail mentioning a particular domain and so affiliate mail and 3rd party mail can affect delivery of corporate mail.
The good news is that continually adjusting filters adapt to positive changes as well as negative ones. In fact, I recently made a segmentation suggestion to a client and they saw a significant increase in inbox delivery at Gmail the next day.
Gmail can be a challenge for delivery, but send mail users want and mail does go to the inbox.

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When spam filters fail

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One of the reason filters fail to catch mail they should is because some spammers invest a lot of time and energy in figuring out how to get past the filters. This is nothing new, 8 or 9 years ago I was in negotiations with a potential client. They told me they had people who started working at 5pm eastern. Their entire job was to craft mail that would get through Hotmail’s filters that day. As soon as they found a particular message that made it to the inbox, they’d blast to their list until the filters caught up. When the filters caught up, they’d start testing again. This went on all night or until the full list was sent.
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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.

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