Many internet marketer emails getting automaticaly labeled as spam in gmail

I noticed this too - when I checked my spam folder looking for a particular email that I didn't get I noticed all these emails from IM'ers in there...I was surprised but then I thought maybe that's not such a bad thing because it probably saved me time and money!

That said, it just goes to show that it's more important now than ever to get my own subscribers to add me to their whitelist...

I just checked my gmail spam folder. Of the 311 messages in it 39 were not spam. So, that's getting it wrong 12.5% of the time--in this case.

Some, as mentioned above, were from name-brand, internationally recognized organizations.

In all cases the 'spam' emails were from lists I had opted to receive email from.

Also noticed one or two emails which were obviously spam had successfully made it past the filters.

The simple way to make sure that you get emails from someone is to add them to your contacts in gmail. If you open an email from a sender and right click the arrow to open the menu labeled "Reply" in the upper corner of the window you will see "Add to Contacts".

Then future emails from the same sender will not be sent to spam.

While gmail is good, and use it alot. Not everyone is so keen. Gmail does have its down side. But I agree, it is all about your customers and helping them quickly if they do actually need help.

Josh,

I noticed this when I sent out a product update email recently. Mentioned it in the newsletter, just in case, and got a bunch of "I didn't receive that email" notes. Almost every one of them was from Gmail.

I just looked in the bulk folder of one Gmail account. If you remove the "Buy Viagra Now" spam, there were 15 messages. I'd subscribed to lists for 6 of them.


Paul

Think of this not from a marketer's perspective, but from the customer's perspective.

As an eMail user, I don't want spam. I don't like it. Most of the offers aren't applicable to me anyway. I strongly dislike spammers. Anything that blasts the heck out of their messages before I even see them is a good thing.

On the flip side, there are messages I want to receive. I asked to receive them. I am on the mailing lists for several companies I have purchased from. One in particular is kind of fun and I don't want to miss out on any of them.

The economy is tough right now. Imagine I sign up for lists to receive sales notices and get discounts or coupons on products and services I use. Maybe that's important to me. We all want to save money, right?

So, these are things I ASKED to receive. I WANT to receive them.

Now, if my eMail provider decides on their own to toss that stuff into the spam bin because, in their view, it's spam, that's just not right. You could conceivably argue that it harms me because I may miss big sales or really good deals on stuff.

If that's the game Google is playing, it's not a good thing for them because they are hurting their own customers.

John,

Gmail is going through a phase in their filter development something like the one Hotmail went through a while back. It's part of the learning curve, and they're "getting it" a lot more quickly than MSN/Hotmail did.

You probably know this stuff, but for the benefit of folks who aren't as familiar with the issue...

Modern mail filters are complicated things, but they basically boil down to complaint-based algorithms, with modifiers. Some of those are based on external blacklists (like the Spamhaus lists), URIBLs (lists of URLs that are contained in emails people complain about), and scoring systems like SpamAssassin.

Relatively little of this is based on spamtraps, outside the Spamhaus stuff, which is extremely accurate these days. The rest is almost exclusively complaint-driven. There simply isn't any other way to handle the situation.

Most of the big providers have their own systems, using a mix of external data and customer feedback. That feedback can involve complaints, opening email, clicking on links in mail, reporting mail as "Not spam," whitelisting senders, and probably other stuff I'm forgetting at the moment. The other data can involve overall sending rates, total mail volume from a source, burst rates, number of bot-infected machines on a network, IP history, and still more.

Bottom line: The users decide most of what goes into the formula. That's a proven concept, and AOL had it down pat for several years. They'll probably flop on it soon, given the massive layoffs in their abuse department last year. There's almost no-one left to handle the constant tweaking needed to keep the formulas accurate.

Each provider uses a different weighting for the various parts, and they take some time to get things in the right balance. Eventually, the big ones get it right. Google is working on it, but they're not quite there yet.

With few exceptions, it's got nothing to do with the ESP. It's all about the messages themselves, and how they're perceived by the recipients.


Paul

Hang on a sec John,

Nobody is saying "we had it coming"..

I just said "we all 'knew' it was coming"..

Let's face it.. first it was who?.. AOL.. then HotMail, Yahoo.. blah blah blah..

None of them listen to reason..

As someone who hosts the majority of my lists on my own server.. I'm well versed at the art of keeping my IP off the backlists and testing my mailings with "mole" subscriber accounts in all the major ESPs so I can see what my subscribers see.

The problem is that there are enough complete IDIOTS and assholes on our lists who hit the spam button that the ESPs provide (in their ultimate wisdom) in their user interfaces.. instead of using the unsub link that us REAL bulk mailers provide.

This problem is probably fueled in part by all the spamming *******s who keep re-importing and selling their unsubs.. not to mention all the "common spam" that has frustrated people into calling everything spam with that God-forsaken button because frankly, that's the most sure way of keeping it all out of their inboxes.

I know I've unsubscribed from a particular ARP user at least 5 times just to be re-imported over and over again.. until I complained to his Domain registrar and server provider.. which finally stopped it. (and NOT ONCE did I hit the spam button.. maybe because I use Outlook Express and don't have one :-D )...

Google doesn't know how you initiated the communication, they just know it was through email. Send the address that is being marked as spam an email and they usually won't be marked as Spam.

All Google knows is that you are receiving emails that you (most likely) don't respond to, delete a lot of quickly, and what they feel is programmatically a relevant amount of people indicating the messages are spam.

If they get it wrong then tell them by white-listing the email address. I'd like to assume they are measuring that too.

Well if that's what Gmail is doing then, that is just about as stupid as it gets with respect to determining what should hit the inbox or not...

That's even more stupid than provided a spam button to the user!

How many people (other than email marketers) check email every day?.. how many email marketers open every email they get for that matter?..

It doesn't take a genius to recognise the paradox that would create.. think about it..

10% of people never open email from whoever@marketer.com..
20% of people only open email from whoever@marketer.com once a week..
30% of people only open email from whoever@marketer.com once a month..

.. so let's dump 60% of email from whoever@marketer.com into the spam box so not even the infrequent openners will open their email..

.. and that way, we can assess an even worse reputation on whoever@marketer.com down the road untill eventually.. ALL their email will go unread... yeah... that's a good way to serve our users who niavely assume we will deliver the email they want to receive... good thing I went to school and learned common sense...

Two different takes on this ...

Google is filtering IM messages as spam because:

1. The messages are similar to other IM messages which ARE spam.

2. "Gurus" and email delivery companies like AWeber are more at risk of being filtered because spammers have been fraudulently sending emails under the guru names and with fake AWeber unsubscribe links.

I forwarded a couple messages to AWeber with fake AWeber details. I have also noticed a steadily increasing amount of spam ostensibly sent by a marketer, but which is fraudulently using the marketer's name.

I would agree with that. I don't use Gmail so I wasn't aware of the spam invite.

That's such a moronic offer to make. What is spam? We've come a long way from it being unsolicited email to affirmatively agreed to be received email one just doesn't want anymore.

I don't recall ever encountering this. It's probably been a long time since I've actually marked anything as spam. Your point is well taken: Marking something as spam is not a substitute for simply unsubscribing.

On the flip side, marketers need to take care to provide a clear method for unsubscribing. This is especially true if email providers put enormous weight on what consumers consider spam.

I wish everyone would stop email marketing, leave it all to me

Jay,

MSN/Live/Hotmail is notoriously flaky about delays. Yahoo is just as bad, but they at least notify you if your mail is delayed or rejected. Different reasons for the same end result. As it's been explained to me, Hotmail has all sorts of issues behind the curtain. Yahoo has pretty much one big one: Not enough capacity for the volume of mail that's sent their way.

Other providers have other issues to varying degrees. Comcast has some draconian practices, for example, but they have equally responsive staff available to correct for false positives.

This problem isn't going to be "fixed" to most people's satisfaction any time soon.


Paul