The challenge of Gmail

A lot of my sales inquiries recently are about getting good inbox delivery at Gmail. I’ve mentioned before, I can usually tell when an ISP changes things because they suddenly become the subject of a great many phone calls.
In this case, Gmail seems to have turned up their engagement filters and is sending a lot more mail to the bulk folder. I have also noticed other people are blogging about Gmail delivery problems. Al eventually determined that it was mailings sent from other IPs that were degrading the delivery of his customer’s emails.
Gmail, more than the other major ISPs, seems to not be weighting IP reputation very heavily these days. They’re looking at domain reputation and they’re using all mentions of a domain in that reputation. A lot of senders, some of them spammers, segregate their email streams (acquisition, marketing, transactional) across IP addresses in order to stop poorly performing mails from harming delivery of other emails they’re sending. But Gmail’s current filtering scheme seems designed to focus on domain reputation and minimize the impact of IP reputation.
This is making the Gmail inbox tough to reach for a lot of mailers these days. Even in cases where the mailer isn’t hiring affiliates or actively partitioning mail, if a domain is seen frequently in spam then delivery for that whole domain is hurting. Signing with DKIM and publishing a DMARC record may help. But the reality right now is that there doesn’t seem to be a silver bullet into the Gmail inbox.

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Email marketing OF THE FUTURE!

ISPs are continually developing tools for their users. Some of the newer tools are automatic filters that help users organize the volumes of mail they’re getting. Gmail released Priority Inbox over a year ago. Hotmail announced new filters as part of Wave 5 back in October.
All of these announcements cause much consternation in the email marketing industry. Just today there was a long discussion on the Only Influencers list about the new Hotmail filtering. There was even some discussion about why the ISPs were doing this.
I think it’s pretty simple why they’re creating new tools: users are asking for them. The core of these new filters is ISPs reacting to consumer demand. They wouldn’t put the energy into development if their users didn’t want it. And many users do and will use priority inbox or the new Hotmail filtering.
Some people are concerned that marketing email will be less effective if mail is not in the inbox.

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More legal problems for Boris

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This case isn’t obviously about email, but the FTC alleges that companies under the “control or influence” of Boris set up a network of fake news sites to deceive consumers into a free trial for diet supplements. The free trial involved enrollment in a monthly renewal program which cost consumers up to $158.00 a month.
The websites did not make the enrollment process clear and the companies made it extremely difficult to stop the renewal.

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Mail.app outs lazy marketers

The default mail client on OS X is Mail.app. In recent versions it does it’s best to bundle threads of email together to make it easier for you to keep track of conversations via email – they appear in the list of messages as a single entry with a badge showing the number of messages in that thread. There are standard ways to track mail threads, but they sometimes get broken by mailing list software, so Mail.app also bundles together messages with an identical sender and Subject line.
That has an unexpected side effect, when it comes to email marketing.

That little “4” badge on the right tells me that this is the fourth time Marriott have sent me this same email (over a period of several months) and there’s really no need for me to open it and read it again.

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