How long does it take to change reputation at Gmail?

Today I was chatting with a potential client who is in the middle of a frustrating warmup at Gmail. They’re doing absolutely the right things, it’s just taking longer than anyone wants. That’s kinda how it is with Gmail, while their algorithm can adapt quickly to changes. Sometimes, like when you’re warming up or trying to change a bad reputation, it can take 3 – 4 weeks to see any direct progress.This is a screenshot of IP reputation on Google Postmaster Tools. The sender made some significant changes in mail sending on some of their IP addresses starting in mid to late December. You can see, that the tools noticed and the reputation of those IPs bad to good fairly rapidly. It took a few more weeks of consistent sending for those two IPs to switch to yellow. And it took around another month for the reputation to flip to high.
Because this company is doing all the right things, and they’re seeing (as they describe it) some small amounts of improvement, I told them to give it another couple weeks. If they weren’t happy with their progress I could help them. But, frankly, until we can tell if this is something other than a normal warmup there isn’t much else to do.
When I got off the phone I felt very much like a doctor telling a patient to take two aspirin and call me in the morning. But, honestly, sometimes that is the right answer. Give it time.

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Google Postmaster bad IP reputation

There are widespread reports this morning (9/11/17) that Google postmaster tools is showing bad IP reputation for IPs starting on 9/9. This issue is affecting just about everyone. Looking through my client’s postmaster pages, I’m seeing red for IP reputation on every client. Even my clients with generally good reputation are seeing bad reputation since 9/9. 

This looks like a reporting or a display error on the part of Google. Many people who are reporting the bad IP reputation are not seeing any significant change in Gmail deliverability.
Looking through client data it appears that domain reputation reporting stopped on 9/8. I am seeing FBL reports for 9/9 and 9/10, for some but not all clients.
My current read on the situation is that something broke internally with the Gmail postmaster reporting. This does not currently appear to be affecting delivery of mail. (If anyone sees differently, drop me an email or tweet me @wise_laura).
I know folks are making sure Google knows. I know that some Gmail folks were directly notified and another Google person is active on Mailop. And we have confirmation that they are aware and are working on fixing it. I will let you know if I hear of a fix timeline.
EDIT: It’s been fixed. Google even fixed the older data. Same client, screenshot from this morning.

 

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Google Postmaster Tools: Last Chance!

I’ll be closing down the Google Postmaster Tools survey Oct 31. If you’ve not had a chance to answer the questions yet, you have through tomorrow.
This data will be shared here. The ulterior motive is to convince Google to make an API available soon due to popular demand.

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Google makes connections

One of the client projects I’m working on includes doing a lot of research on MXs, including some classification work. Part of the work involves identifying the company running the MX. Many of the times this is obvious; mail.protection.outlook.com is office365, for instance.

There are other cases where the connection between the MX and the host company is not as obvious. That’s where google comes into play. Take the domain canit.ca, it’s a MX for quite a few domains in this data set. Step one is to visit the website, but there’s no website there. Step 2 is drop the domain into google, who tells me it’s Roaring Penguin software.
In some cases, though, the domain wasn’t as obvious as the Roaring Penguin link. In those cases, Google would present me with seemingly irrelevant hosting pages. It didn’t make sense until I started digging through hosting documentation. Inevitably, whenever Google gave me results that didn’t make sense, they were right. The links were often buried in knowledge base pages telling users how to configure their setup and mentioning the domain I was searching for.
The interesting piece was that often it was the top level domain, not the support pages, that Google presented to me. I had to go find the actual pages. Based on that bit of research, it appears that Google has a comprehensive map of what domains are related to each other.
This is something we see in their handling of email as well. Gmail regularly makes connections between domains that senders don’t expect. I’ve been speaking for a while about how Gmail does this, based on observation of filtering behavior. Working through multiple searches looking at domain names was the first time I saw evidence of the connections I suspected. Gmail is able to connect seemingly disparate hostnames and relate them to one another.
For senders, it means that using different domains in an attempt to isolate different mainstreams doesn’t work. Gmail understands that domainA in acquisition mail is also the same as domainB in opt-in mail is the same as domainC in transactional mail. Companies can develop a reputation at Google which affects all email, not just a particular mail stream. This makes it harder for senders to compartmentalize their sends and requires compliance throughout the organization.
Acquisition programs do hurt all mail programs, at least at Gmail.
 

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