Step by Step guide to fixing Gmail delivery

I regularly see folks asking how to fix their Gmail delivery. This is a perennial question (see my 2019 post and the discussions from various industry experts in the comments). Since that discussion I haven’t seen as much complaining about problems.

There are steps that work to get delivery fixed at Gmail.

  1. Verify that your mail is actually going to bulk. I had one client that had a bad / medium reputation at Google, but their mail was actually inboxing for the most part. We spent a lot of time trying to fix the reputation without success but it didn’t matter as they were reaching the folks they needed to reach. 
  2. Cut way back on your mail to google. Stop sending to anyone who is currently receiving the mail in their bulk folder. About the only way to know who’s getting mail in bulk is to focus on those folks who are opening or clicking on mail. Send only to people who have opened or clicked in the recent past (you can pick the timeline, but I don’t recommend going back more than 90 days for this). Do this for a minimum of a month. 
  3. Monitor both delivery and your reputation. The reputation graphs at google are a lagging indicator and they take between 3 and 4 weeks to reflect changes in behavior. 
  4. If you don’t see improvement: investigate what mail that you don’t know is using your domain and ensure they implement the same level of hygiene. 
  5. If you don’t see improvement still then look at what other mail you are sending to google. There are lots of small domains that use GSuite to host their mail. Mail to those domains does affect reputation. Sometimes there’s enough volume that it breaks remediation and you need to apply the same hygiene to the hosted domains before you get an improvement in delivery.
  6. Once you start to see improvement in inboxing and reputation you can start to re-engage with the addresses that you removed for the reputation repair process. Do not drop them back into the feed all at once, start a warmup process to get you back up to full sends. You may need to permanently remove some unengaged recipients from the list.

It does take time to see improvements reflected in Google Postmaster tools. The good news is that when you’re on the right track mail will start to go to the inbox before you see your reputation improve.

It takes patience to fix delivery at Gmail, but it can be done. Focus on sending mail to the people you know are getting mail in their inbox and who are actively interacting with that mail. Eventually, the ML filters will learn this is wanted mail and know all of your mail should go to the inbox.

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Why do ISPs do that?

One of the most common things I hear is “but why does the ISP do it that way?” The generic answer for that question is: because it works for them and meets their needs. Anyone designing a mail system has to implement some sort of spam filtering and will have to accept the potential for lost mail. Even the those recipients who runs no software filtering may lose mail. Their spamfilter is the delete key and sometimes they’ll delete a real mail.
Every mailserver admin, whether managing a MTA for a corporation, an ISP or themselves inevitably looks at the question of false positives and false negatives. Some are more sensitive to false negatives and would rather block real mail than have to wade through a mailbox full of spam. Others are more sensitive to false positives and would rather deal with unfiltered spam than risk losing mail.
At the ISPs, many of these decisions aren’t made by one person, but the decisions are driven by the business philosophy, requirements and technology. The different consumer ISPs have different philosophies and these show in their spamfiltering.
Gmail, for instance, has a lot of faith in their ability to sort, classify and rank text. This is, after all, what Google does. Therefore, they accept most of the email delivered to Gmail users and then sort after the fact. This fits their technology, their available resources and their business philosophy. They leave as much filtering at the enduser level as they can.
Yahoo, on the other hand, chooses to filter mail at the MTA. While their spamfoldering algorithms are good, they don’t want to waste CPU and filtering effort on mail that they think may be spam. So, they choose to block heavily at the edge, going so far as to rate limit senders that they don’t know about the mail. Endusers are protected from malicious mail and senders have the ability to retry mail until it is accepted.
The same types of entries could be written about Hotmail or AOL. They could even be written about the various spam filter vendors and blocklists. Every company has their own way of doing things and their way reflects their underlying business philosophy.

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What kind of mail do filters target?

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.

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Thanks for the great session

I had a great time answering questions at the 2015 All About eMail Virtual Conference & Expo today. Thanks so much to everyone who participated and asked questions. They were great and I’m sorry we didn’t have more time.
I did get some questions on twitter (@wise_laura) afterwards. One was about an example I gave to explain how filters are complex. There have been rumors going around recently that Gmail is filtering mail with more than 3 URLs in it. Let me just say right now THIS IS NOT TRUE emails with more than 3 URLs in them are being delivered just fine to Gmail.
There is a situation involving the number (and type) of URLs that I think are a useful example of the filter complexity happening at some places, like Gmail. I started working on it, but don’t quite have time to finish it today, but will keep working on and it should go up in the next day or so.
Thanks again to everyone who joined the session. You asked some great questions and I had fun answering them.
 

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