Understanding the Difference Between Gmail Email Addresses on the Seed List

Estimated reading time: 4 minutes

At GlockApps, we understand that our clients may be concerned about the credibility of the email placement results returned by the Inbox Insight tool and we hope this article gives an explanation of the seed list used for email testing and the factors that may be affecting email placement.

How Do GlockApps Seed Emails Work?

It is important to note that the GlockApps seed list acts as a cold audience without expressing any user interaction with received messages. The seed email accounts are set up using the default rules. No custom email filtering rules or conditions are applied to the messages sent to the seed email addresses. 

The decision about where the email is placed is taken by the particular ISP based on its default spam filtering rules and depends on your sender’s reputation and email content. 

Most inbox providers take three major factors into account when determining email placement in the mailbox: email content, sender reputation, and user engagement. Sender reputation is the key, which beats everything. With that said, if the sender’s reputation (primarily the sender’s domain reputation) is high, the emails are likely to be delivered to the Inbox regardless of whether or not the messages sent from the domain have been interacted with before.

What’s the Difference between Gmail’s Seed Addresses in GlockApps?

Gmail stands out by utilizing smarter filters, which evaluate a lot more signals. After conducting thousands of tests, it was discovered that Gmail may look at the volume of the messages received by an email account. If those messages are never interacted with, Gmail may start delivering all subsequent emails to Spam. 

To deliver as accurate results as possible, we introduced two categories of seed email addresses for Gmail:

Gmail (6 months+) are 6+ months old seed email accounts, which emulate the basic Google spam filtering algorithm applied to all mailboxes of the same age. 

Gmail (4 years+) are 4+ years old seed email addresses, which have received a lot of emails and which emulate organic Google spam filtering.

The two categories differ by the number of email messages received during their existence on the seed list. No user interaction is ever shown for the two categories of email addresses.

Why May Email Placement Differ?

As mentioned above, Gmail’s filters are sensitive to the volume of emails sent to a mailbox. Additionally, Gmail evaluates prior user interaction with the emails more than other inbox providers.

With that said, when testing your email deliverability with GlockApps, you may receive different email placement results for different categories of Gmail email addresses. 

6+ months old addresses may show more Inbox (Primary and Promotions) placements while 4+ years old emails may show more, if not all, Spam folder placements. 

For email testing, it is recommended that you include both Gmail categories in the seed list to better understand where your email would go depending on the mailbox age and received traffic.

It is noted that user interaction and email volume are just two of many evaluated factors that can but do not necessarily, make a difference in where the message is delivered. 

Whatever factors Gmail and other inbox providers evaluate when deciding on email placement, all of the seed email addresses provide accurate and confident results because it’s not a calculation of a probable email placement, but a real-time email deliverability testing process.