What’s up with gmail?

laura
Industry
May 16, 2019

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 are seeing

Cutting back to engaged only users is not effectively improving reputation.
Inboxing is no longer directly tracking with reputation on GPT (high reputation mail is going to bulk, low reputation mail is going to inbox).
Recipients are complaining about mail being misfiltered.

What can we do?

Right now, we’re mostly falling back on the things that worked 6 months ago: cut back sending to the most engaged recipients and then gradually add back in other addresses once you’re back in the inbox. The challenge is we’re not seeing the improvements we’ve become accustomed to seeing when using this strategy.

With one of my clients their reputation, as reported on GPT, actually fell during the period of cutbacks. Based on consistently high open rates and various inbox tests, including my own and those by one of the commercial vendors, we determined that recipients were getting mail in the inbox despite the low reputation.

Other delivery experts have reported similar patterns. Horrible domain and IP reputation (sometime in the deepest, darkest red) but reaching the inbox and seeing open rates in the 20 – 30% range.

I’ve also seen the flip side, green IPs and domain rep, but the mail is going to bulk.

That’s frustrating.

Yup. Sorry. Wish I had better news. Right now we’re falling back to what worked 4 months ago, because it’s what we had and it did work.

One thing that is new information to me is that, according to folks inside Google, the domain and IP reputation showing on google postmaster tools includes all domains handled by gmail, including GSuite hosted domains. Maybe these are having a disproportional effect on reputation, I don’t know.

My current thoughts are:

Pay attention to your engagement and open rates at Gmail
Don’t worry about domain and IP rep too much, if your marketing is performing.
Maybe we need to start including G Suite hosted domains in engagement restrictions, as painful as that’s going to be.

Anyone got any insight? Is there something we’re missing here?

Insight into Gmail filtering

Last week I posted a link to an article discussing how Gmail builds defenses to protect their users from malicious mail. One of the things I found very interesting in that article was the discussion about how Gmail deploys many changes at once, to prevent people from figuring out what the change was.
Let’s take a look at what Gmail said.

One letter off…

I’m working on a blog post about the new Gmail tabbed inbox and the messages Gmail is inserting into the promotions tab. The messages aren’t showing up on most of my accounts, so I logged into an infrequently used account of mine. Ads are there, I got my screenshots and some data about the behaviour of the messages. So far so good.
I also discovered that at least two other women are using my address. One of them apparently ordered a bunch of wedding stuff from David’s Bridal shop using my email address. I hope Kirstie got her special order in time.
The other case is more interesting. I found dozens of emails in my inbox from what appeared to be friends including me in their email forward chain.
The Comic Sans. The FW:FW:FW:FW:FW subject lines. The horribly drawn cartoons. The inspirational messages. The prayer requests. The invites to bridge night. The followup demands that I reply to their invites for bridge night. The sad emails that I didn’t go to bridge night. There were emails from grandchildren. Questions about where I’d been and if I moved. Prayer chains. The messages go on and on.
Looking back through my inbox, this has been going on since sometime late in 2012. (Told you this was an infrequently used account). I looked and looked and I think I figured out what happened. A woman named Helen appears to to have an email address one letter off from mine (string@ vs stringsstring@) and one of her church friends tried to reply to her and dropped the ‘s’ from the email address. Once she did that, everyone else just kept hitting “reply all” and are including me in their forward chain.
It’s not commercial, it’s not spam. It’s just a bunch of people mistyping an email address and sending mail to someone they don’t know. I’m kinda glad it was a bunch of church ladies rather than Carlos Danger sending … well… Carlos Danger type messages.
People get email addresses wrong sometimes. It happens (ask me about the time I almost got my mailserver blocked because I mistyped an address while sending mail to a blocklist maintainer and hit a trap address by mistake…). The problem is that it can overwhelm an uninvolved person’s mailbox, even when it’s not commercial. Sure, if I was logging in to this account more often I’d probably have shut it down, but if they were paying attention they would have realized Helen is never replying to anything they send.
I kinda feel the same about commercial mailers that send me mail over and over and over again. I never open it, I never reply to it, I never respond to it. I wonder if there is actually anyone actually sending the mail, or if there’s just a lonely mailserver bricked up in a wall somewhere continually sending out spam.
Don’t be the bricked up server in the wall. Pay attention to what your recipients are doing.

Delivery is not dependent on authentication

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.