Best practices for Gmail’s new and improved email filters

Having had a rude awakening during the past three weeks, email newsletter marketers have seen the effects of Gmail implementing its new, stricter rules for spam identification.

Their latest effort in the battle against bad-mail has already caused much frustration amongst users and may show greater challenges ahead in the effort to ensure reliable email deliverability. With significantly more severe screening measures, suddenly you are going to see a larger percentage of sends canned as spam than ever before.

In an attempt to appease users and lower complaint levels; Gmail, Hotmail and Yahoo have all been amping-up their algorithms recently. Unless you are spam-agnostic and couldn't care less, it's probable that their overbearing approach is having an undesired effect on your email newsletter marketing campaign.

Life would be much easier if the Gmail techs were to change their algorithm to tip the balance in a more email friendly direction, since it would be considerably less effort to flag the occasional spam emails dropping into our inbox rather than needing to sift through lists of questionable messages to find the important ones. Anyone who has ever used  bulk email marketing will know that spam filtering is not simple and the same is true for being filter-conscious while creating a campaign.

Mainly taking into account areas relating to ISP reputation, the new security protocols place an extreme amount of focus on email content. Thereby seeking to stop senders from recycling the precise same copy to large volumes of recipients. But that's what we've always been saying; it’s a good habit to customise your content and provide several versions of the same text to begin with, and now things are changing so that your deliverability could be riding on this.

As for those on the receiving end, there's no escaping that you will now need to more routinely run through their spam folder to find the info that they care about seeing, but that may have overshot their inbox. The extra email house-keeping might become a big point of contention for users, the advantage for direct email marketers is that those who publish, quality email content, uniquely written, will make it to the trusted sender zone. Having tighter filters means that fewer potential email marketing competitors will be sharing the same attention-space and that customers can afford to take that little extra time in examining your emails, giving you better influence.

“All big ESPs are now including reputation filters. This is not limited to sending IP and sending domain reputation. From address (friendly from) and from domain reputation is also becoming a very important factor in getting your mail out to your recipients.” - Shaun Swanepoel, GraphicMail Network Administrator

Making use of a reputable ESP and simply not spamming is, as always, the best advice for working around filters.