I’m seeing some questions about TLS and Gmail. Folks are seeing a correlation between sending without TLS and the mail going to bulk.
Has anyone seen this? Are you sending mail with TLS and can’t get to the inbox? Or are you sending mail without TLS and getting to the inbox?
Inquiring minds and all that.
Many companies have the occasional “oops” where they send email they probably shouldn’t have. This can often cause a decrease in reputation and subsequent delivery problems. Some companies rush to fix things by changing domains.
Read MoreMost retailers have realized that sending unsolicited email is bad for their overall deliverability. Still, the idea they can send mail to people who never heard of them is seductive.
Enter affiliate email. That magical place where companies hire an agency, or a contractor, or some other third party to send email advertising their new product. Their mail and company reputation is protected because they aren’t sending the messages. Even better, affiliates assure their customers that the mail is opt-in. I’m sure some of them even believe it.
The reality is a little different from what affiliates and their customers want to believe.
All to often we think of filters as a linear scale. There’s blocking on one end, and there’s an inbox on the other. Every email falls somewhere on that line.
Makes sense, right? Bad mail is blocked, good mail goes to the inbox. The bulk folder exists for mail that’s not bad enough to block, but isn’t good enough to go to the inbox.
Once we get to that model, we can think of filters as just different tolerances for what is bad and good. Using the same model, we can see aggressive filters block more mail and send more mail to bulk, while letting less into the inbox. There are also permissive filters that block very little mail and send most mail to the inbox.
That’s a somewhat useful model, but it doesn’t really capture the full complexity of filters. There isn’t just good mail and bad mail. Mail isn’t simply solicited or unsolicited. Filters take into account any number of factors before deciding what to do with mail.