Email delivery update from Gmail

Gmail has posted some guidelines for bulk senders to increase deliverability to Gmail recipients.

If you use Gmail, you likely already know its spam filtering is one of the best in the biz… However, lately (in my inbox at least) more and more legitimate mail is ending up in the spam folders. This is because Gmail’s spam filtering is very largely based on user’s hitting the “This is spam” or “This is not spam” button.

A lot of the guidelines are pretty standard among all major ISPs. However, a few stuck out to me, that you may want to be aware of:

• All bulk messages you send must be formatted according to RFC 2822 SMTP standards and, if using HTML, w3.org standards.
• Messages should indicate that they are bulk mail, using the ‘Precedence: bulk’ header field.
• Attempts to hide the true sender of the message or the true landing page for any web links in the message may result in non-delivery.

Recommendations for unsubscribes:

• A prominent link in the body of an email leading users to a page confirming his or her unsubscription (no input from the user, other than confirmation, should be required).
• Explicitly indicate the email address subscribed to your list.
• Support a URL method of unsubscribing from your mailing list (this is beneficial if your mailing list manager can’t tell who is unsubscribing based on the ‘Reply-to:’ address).

Check out the full list of guidelines…

Thanks to Tamara at Be Relevant for pointing this out!

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Posted in Email marketing, Kelly Rusk