Email filters used by mailbox providers do a good job – they keep spam out of our Inboxes. But from the other side, “thanks” to spam filters, every fifth legitimate email never reaches the intended recipient.
What’s more is that every mailbox provider uses its own filtering algorithm to distinguish good emails and spam. It makes it even harder for email marketers to deliver their emails to the Inbox.
Here we’ll take the mystery off to make senders understand the filtering rules of the top three mailbox providers – Gmail, Outlook, and Yahoo!Mail – and help them send their legitimate emails to the Inbox.
The Part I of our Email Marketer’s Guide is dedicated to Gmail.
How to avoid spam filters? Many, if not only every single email marketer has ever asked this question. Spam filters seem to be the main obstacle on the way to the recipient’s Inbox.
Probably you’ll be disappointed if we say that it is not possible to avoid spam filters, but you have to accept that fact. Spam filters are a part of the email delivery process. When you send an email, it is filtered: to the Inbox, to a special tab, to a spam folder, or it is blocked completely.
Filters play a massive role in the email deliverability. That’s why our goal at GlockApps is to help our users understand how spam filters work, how mailbox providers use them, and how to get the emails filtered to the Inbox.
There is no email marketer that has never received bounced emails. Sooner or later bounced emails happen even if you have the cleanest list possible.
From one side, bounce emails are a nasty thing because they negatively influence your sender reputation and deliverability.
From the other side, they do a good job by giving you a plenty of information about the quality of your mailing list, recipient engagement, and your email campaign performance.
You just need to understand what bounce emails tell you in order to determine and address the issues.
Can't send emails to Yahoo! subscribers? It's highly possible that your sending IP address was blacklisted by this provider.
Users of Yahoo!, Google, Hotmail, and other major mailbox providers are often victims of spammers. Mailbox providers are forced to introduce filters and blacklists to protect their users from unsolicited emails.
Bad email practices typically lead to serious deliverability problems like spam placements, blocked and dropped messages which have a direct negative impact on your sender reputation and email performance.
To protect their users from unsolicited emails, mailbox providers often put bad senders to the blacklist and do not deliver their messages to the target recipients. Gmail, Outlook/Hotmail, Yahoo, GoDaddy and some other major mailbox providers maintain their own blacklists to stop spammers.
One of the common reasons the emails do not reach the target Gmail recipients is the blocking of the email sender by Google. If you are not able to deliver emails to your Gmail subscribers either, then this article will surely help you.
Recipient engagement is becoming more and more important in your ability to deliver email to an Inbox though there is only one ISP that looks at an email engagement at a high level. It's Google.
There is a couple of others that do it as well – primary Microsoft and Yahoo. As to all other global and regional providers, they don't look at email engagement when making Inbox or spam decisions. There are a few reasons why:
When you hit "Send" in your email system or email service provider, your email is transmitted to the outgoing mail server and then to the mail server at the receiving ISP, which then decides what to do with your email based on the sending IP's reputation, authentication, your sending practices, and recipient engagement.
These factors directly influence whether or not your email will be delivered and where it will land (Inbox, Spam, Promotions).
Since the release of GlockApps we have tested hundreds of emails and looked through hundreds of reports.
From our experience, we learned that one of the common causes of deliverability problems, in particular, spam placements, was the message content (providing that you have a confirmed opt-in email list and send relevant content).
