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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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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Parasites hurt email marketing

As a small business owner I am a ripe target for many companies. They buy my address from some lead generation firm, or they scrape it off LinkedIn, and they send me a message that pretends to be personalized but isn’t really.
“I looked at your website… we have a list of email addresses to sell you.”
“We offer cold calling services… can I set up a call with you?”
“I have scheduled a meeting tomorrow so I can tell you about our product that will solve all your technical issues and is also a floor wax.”
None of these emails are anything more than spam. They’re fake personalized. There’s no permission. On a good day they’ll have an opt out link. On a normal day they might include an actual name.
These are messages coming to an email address I’ve spent years trying to protect from getting onto mailing lists. I don’t do fishbowls, I’m careful about who I give my card to, I never use it to sign up for anything. And, still, that has all been for naught.
I don’t really blame the senders, I mean I do, they’re the ones that bought my address and then invested in business automation software that sends me regular emails trying to get me to give them a phone number. Or a contact for “the right person at your business to talk to about this great offer that will change your business.”
The real blame lies with the people who pretend that B2B spam is somehow not spam. Who have pivoted their businesses from selling consumer lists to business lists because permission doesn’t matter when it comes to businesses. The real blame lies with companies who sell “marketing automation software” that plugs into their Google Apps account and hijacks their reputation to get to the inbox. The real blame lies with list cleansing companies who sell list buyers a cleansing service that only hides the evidence of spamming.
There are so many parasites in the email space. They take time, energy and resources from large and small businesses, offering them services that seem good, but really are worthless.
The biologically interesting thing about parasites, though, is that they do better if they don’t overwhelm the host system. They have to stay small. They have to stay hidden. They have to not cause too much harm, otherwise the host system will fight back.
Email fights back too. Parasites will find it harder and harder to get mail delivered in any volume as the host system adapts to them. Already if I look in my junk folder, my filters are correctly flagging these messages as spam. And my filters see a very small portion of mail. Filtering companies and the business email hosting systems have a much broader view and much better defenses.
These emails annoy me, but I know that they are a short term problem.  As more and more businesses move to hosted services, like Google Apps and Office365 the permission rules are going to apply to business addresses as well as consumer addresses. The parasites selling products and services to small business owners can’t overwhelm email. The defenses will step in first.
 

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Gmail and the PBL

Yesterday I wrote about the underlying philosophy of spam filtering and how different places have different philosophies that drive their filtering decisions. That post was actually triggered by a blog post I read where the author was asking why Gmail was using the PBL but instead of rejecting mail from PBL listed hosts they instead accepted and bulkfoldered the mail.
The blog post ends with a question:

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