Taggmail

Google Suspicious Link Warnings

A number of folks in the sender space are reporting intermittent “This link may be suspicious” warnings on their emails. I first heard about it a few weeks ago from some clients. One wasn’t sure what was going on, the other found a bunch of malware uploaded into their customer accounts. At least 3 people have mentioned it today. One of them asked on Mailop, and the couple Google...

What’s up with gmail?

Increasingly over the last few months I’ve been seeing questions from folks struggling with reputation at Gmail and inbox delivery. It seems like everything exploded in the beginning for 2019 and everything changed. I’ve been avoiding blaming it all on TensorFlow, but maybe the addition of the new ML engine really did fundamentally change how things were working at gmail. What folks...

Gmail suddenly puts mail in the bulk folder

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...

TLS and Gmail delivery

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.

My domain reputation is bad, should I get a new domain?

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. Getting a new domain does not fix the problem! Brand new domains, those registered less than 30 days, have really bad reputations. Blame the spammers...

Marking mail as spam says what?

I wear a number of hats and have a lot of different email addresses. I like to keep the different email addresses separate from each other, “don’t cross the streams” as it were.   Recently I’ve been getting spam to my womenofemail.org address asking about the wordtothewise.com website. I’m not sure where Ms. Catherine Metcalf bought my Women of Email address or...

Fun with spam filters

I recently had a challenging travel experience in the Netherlands, trying to get from Schipol airport to a conference I was speaking at. As part of my attempt to get out of the airport, I installed UBER on my phone. There were some challenges with getting UBER to authorise my phone number, so I tried linking it to my Gmail account. I checked Gmail today and noticed there was a message from UBER...

Can I get access to Google Postmaster tools if I’m using an ESP?

The answer is almost certainly yes, but there are definitely cases where it the answer is no. If you’re using your own domains for the return path and/or the d= value then you can set up postmaster tools for those domains. If you’re using a domain managed by the ESP, or a subdomain where the ESP manages the DNS, you may need your ESP to publish the correct key in DNS to authenticate...

Dodgy PDF handling at Gmail

We sent out some W-9s this week. For non-Americans and those lucky enough not to have to deal with IRS paperwork those are tax forms. They’re simple single page forms with the company name, address and tax ID numbers on them. Because this is the 21st Century we don’t fill them in with typewriters and snail mail them out, we fill in a form online at the IRS website which gives us PDFs...

Affiliate marketing overview

Most 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...

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