One of the delivery challenges that regularly comes up in various delivery discussion spaces is the “Gmail suddenly put my mail in spam.” From my perspective, there is rarely a “suddenly” about Gmail’s decision making process. As I was answering one of these questions I had a number of thoughts. I’ll share them here on the blog so I can find them in the future...
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 people believe that if they remove non-existent addresses from their mailing lists that their lists will make it to the inbox without a problem. In fact, an entire industry has grown up around the idea that sending mail to valid addresses can never be spam. This isn’t true, of course, spammers use many of the same techniques legitimate mailers do to clean their lists. I don’t...
I’m working on a blog post about correlation and causation and how cleaning a list doesn’t make it opt-in and permission isn’t actually as outdated as many think and is still important when it comes to delivery. Today is a hard-to-word day, so I headed over to twitter. Only to find someone in my personal network re-tweeted this: Don't add professional contacts to newsletter...
All too often folks come to me with delivery problems and lead off with all of the things they’ve done to send mail right. They assure me they’re using SPF and DKIM and DMARC and they can’t understand why things are bad. There is this pervasive belief that if you do all the technical things right then you will reach the inbox. Getting the technical bits right is an important...
An email address was entered into our website An email address was associated with a purchase on our website. We have a relationship with a 3rd party that shares email addresses with us. We have a cookie on a web browser that visited out website and we sent an email to the address associated with that cookie. We both went to the same conference and the attendee list was given to every exhibitor...
Have you heard about the Baader-Meinhoff effect? The Baader-Meinhof effect, also known as frequency illusion, is the illusion in which a word, a name, or other thing that has recently come to one’s attention suddenly seems to appear with improbable frequency shortly afterwards (not to be confused with the recency illusion or selection bias). Baader–Meinhof effect at Wikipedia There has to...
Yesterday,Gmail announced they’re rolling out AMP support in their web client, with support for mobil coming soon. AMP allows a more web page experience in email. Things that would previously have required clicking through to a separate web page, can now be done directly within the message. According to the announcement, this feature is only available to senders who register with Google...
In the email system there are all sorts of different belief systems. One contingent will have you believe that IP reputation is the be all and end all of delivery. Get a decent IP reputation, and the clouds will part, angels will sing and your mail will reach the inbox. This group of folks often recommends every sender should have their own dedicated IP address. Anything less is just admitting...
This morning I got a rather suspicious message from a colleague on LinkedIn. I asked around and it seems other folks got the same message and were equally confused. I didn’t click the link because that seemed risky. A few hours later one of the folks I had talked to mentioned that the person’s entire profile was gone. Likewise, the above message disappeared from my messages tab...
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