we sell software licenses but our emails end in the gmail Promotions tab of the main Inbox or even in the spam folder. During the purchase process we send one email with login details, another email with a link to download the invoice and finally another email with an attachment containing the license. Also on every new release, more or less every six months, we send an email notifying users about free upgrade to the new version. We have some complains from gmail users about not having received the license because they didn't notice the email was classified as a promotion or spam. All emails come dkim signed, from spf authorized servers, we are even on the main postmaster feedback loops and in several dns whitelists.
Is there any way to have gmail correctly classify this emails ?
I am not expert on bulk emails. My suggestions are based as my experiences as active Gmail consumer and experiences with learning algorithms
(1) Avoid being labeled spam:
Request/Advice users to add your Id into their contact list.
Follow the GMail Bulk Mail Guidelines link.
Apart from DKIM/SPF do you handle abuse, unsubscribe emails?
If a user marks you spam, nobody can help. Your emails are annoying to user and Gmail will honor user's preference.
(2) Make it to Primary Tab in Gmail Inbox:
Categories in the INBOX are filtered based on Gmail learning algorithm about user preference.
Play with keywords in your mail. If Gmail identifies email content to be important, they'll put it in Primary. I noticed emails from Godaddy.com with expiration/renewal/promo/profile complete request etc always make it to my Primary tab. Either they have figured it out or could be I have replied to them couple of time. Or I may have spend above threshold time staring at content of their emails.
You may request user to mark Star and Important. GMail learning algorithm should pick it.
Usually nobody replies emails in Promotion and Social tabs. Have your user reply your email. Not the best idea I know.
Noticed another ‘major’ retails emails practice :
For Order confirmation they used retailer#accounts.retailer.com : GMail classified Primary
For Reminders, Upgrade and feedback they used retailer#value.retailer.com : GMail classified Promotions
For Pure promotion they have yet another email ID dealnews#promo.retailer.com : GMail classified Promotions
If user is really annoyed with hundreds of promo email, GMAIL learning algorithm may classify promos to go into spam first than value emails. Three ID strategy seems promising.
Good luck !
Related
I've seen a lot of questions about disabling the Gmail smart reply feature from the user point of view, but nothing about it from a server/app PoV.
In our application, we send some emails containing data about future events or inquiring schedule availability, each email including a link to a dedicated page of our app to answer.
But Gmail doesn't understand it's an automated email, even if the sender is a no-reply#my.app.com address, and keeps suggesting "smart" replies. This provides a terrible UX, where the email ends with a fine answer button, then Gmail suggested replies which leads to an unused address.
Does someone knows if there is a way to force it to suggest nothing? The only solution we've got so far is to change the content of the message, trying to find specific words that won't trigger Gmail feature :-/
We managed to hide the GMail smart replies by adding a footer note in our emails, stating that this is an automated message and that user should not reply to it. Seems to do the trick for now :)
In french, this looks like:
Cet email est un envoi automatique ; merci de ne pas y répondre.
Some email clients consider our emails as a phishing (in Office 365). The only thing that was missing based on the https://mxtoolbox.com/SuperTool.aspx?action=mx was DMARC entry missing.
I've added TXT DNS record like this (TTL 1hr):
v=DMARC1;p=none;pct=100;rua=mailto:postmaster#mydomain.com
Can it resolve the issue? Is there any specific action required to make it work with Mailgun / GoDaddy?
Thanks in advance for any help/info.
Since you have p=none, it won't resolve the issue, you need to inform the mail server to reject the email. Basically, you're just in monitoring mode with p=none.
What that being said, it sounds like you're saying Office 365 is regarding your emails as a phishing attempt. I think you might be hitting their spam filter based on certain keywords. Send an email to yourself and look at the PCL in the email headers in the outlook account and see what it says.
If you don't know how to see view the headers and just want to make it easy, you can use an inbox tester that will show you the headers.
You can also open a ticket with Microsoft and ask them why the PCL is high on your emails. They might be able to assist.
Link to: Microsoft Sender Support
Another good thing to do is to go through this Email Checker Guide, it touches on every aspect of sending email. You might have a mis-configuration someplace that's causing the issue.
Using SendGrid through Azure (free version).
I recently disabled a user's email because it was receiving way too much SPAM. Prior to doing this my activities list was about 1-2 pages long with recognizable e-mails my system was sending out per customer input in a website (there is a workflow for forms which the user inputs, then my system sends out an e-mail confirming input).
Now that I have disabled that e-mail, I am seeing upwards of 59 pages of activity just for one day (since I disabled the e-mail address), most of which is listed as "Deferred" or "Processed". The lists include SPAM e-mail addresses (something-reverse-mortgage#whatever.net, etc.).
Reading the SendGrid documentation, it seems that "Deferred" activities just mean that the receiving ISP is asking SendGrid to slow down. I take this to mean that my server is sending these e-mails.
This is worrisome obviously. Disabling that e-mail has this unintended consequence of seeing hundreds of "Defered" activity listings in SendGrid.
I am confused, however, if this is just the system getting these e-mails and then trying to bounce them back through my server. Since it's SPAM and likely not a real e-mail address, is SendGrid just trying to return the e-mails? Hence the activity?
If so, is this something that will eventually die down, or should I do something to prevent SendGrid from returning these obviously bogus SPAM e-mails to what it thinks is the originating sender?
Thanks in advance.
I send about 100K emails a month with sendgrid and I don't worry at all about deferred. About 1/3 of my outgoing emails are gmail and gmail is very agressive at blocking emails when you send more than 50 or so at once. They simply reject and sendgrid tries again later. They all seem to go thru within about 24 hours.
Recently I booked one flight from A --> B ---> C. On the day before departure, I checked with Gmail and it reminded me that the flight from A to B will be delayed for about two hours. Then I got a message from the air company to tell me that they have changed my flight from B to C into another one which is almost two hours later than my original one. It seems Google already knew my 1st flight will be delayed even before the airline company.
I'm curious what's the channel for Google to get the information? I checked with flightaware and nothing about the delay of my flight.
Google gets a lot of data from several channels. To name a few:
gmail
adsense
google crawler
google+
google chrome
google maps
Naturally there are many projects not mentioned here, developed or owned by Google. Since Google is one of the biggest companies in the IT sector, it is no wonder that their database gathered the data earlier than your notification was sent.
From your case one cannot say that Google new about the information earlier, the only thing we know is that they have sent you the notification earlier. It is quite possible that one of the employees of the flight company uses gmail. If so, then his/her mails arrive to Google's server and some automatic analyzers parse the data and then trigger the notification event. If the company was still discussing how they should communicate the delay on gmail, in the meantime Google was analyzing the gathered data and as a result sent you the notification.
You will never know the exact details unless you will start to work for Google, since Google employees will not disclose the inner information of the company to outsiders, outsiders do not have the given information. We can only guess, but we can more-or-less know that the data was gathered by Google.
Events from Gmail
When you get an email about an event like a flight, concert, or restaurant reservation, it's added to your calendar automatically. If you don't want events from Gmail on your calendar, you can delete a single event, or change your settings so that events aren't added automatically.
Note: Events from Gmail aren't available for Government accounts, accounts with data location restrictions, or Google Accounts that don't have Gmail.
I have a site on a dedicated server with it's own IP range that has been running for a good few years. We have a notification email address (mailout#domain.com) which we use to send automated emails (activation emails when a user signs up and notification emails if something relevant to them happens, eg someone befriends them or comments on their picture etc). Users can select whether to receive these notifications or not. We have SPF and RDNS setup.
Email from all our other email accounts go to hotmail/gmail/yahoo mail etc correctly into the inbox. However any mail sent from the mailout#domain.com account (whether automatically by the server or manually via outlook) is delivered correctly to the inboxes for yahoo and gmail however goes into Junk in Hotmail (but other #domain.com addresses deliver to hotmail's inbox correctly). It says at the top of the message that MS Smartscreen marked this message as junk. I signed up for MS Smart Network Data Services to monitor the IP and it says it's not blocked but it displays Bot-like behaviour (which kind of makes sense as our notifications are kind of bot like even though they're not spam).
I can't work out what to do to prevent this from happening, we've authenticated the email, there's obviously not a general block on the IP as emails from different accounts on the same domain are going through successfully. It doesn't seem to be the format of the email either because if I send identical emails from mailout#domain.com and contact#domain then the one from contact# gets through to the inbox but the one from mailout# goes through to junk.
I can't really work out what to do and obviously trying to get MS to sort it out is never going to happen and i've used all their available tools. I can obviously try setting up a new email address (eg noreply#domain.com) and using that for notifications but i assume it will only be a matter of time before that gets blocked as well.
I would be immensely grateful for any suggestions anyone has!
Thanks so much,
Dave
You don't have many options. Try to do as many of the following as you can:
Reach out to MS support (don't discard this notion)
Implement DKIM and possibly DMARC (which are vastly more informative than SPF)
Change your IP address to something cleaner
Find and follow bulk sender best practices, e.g. M³AAWG's BCPs, perhaps the Help – I'm on a Blocklist doc