It’s crazy to realize that Gmail released tabs back in May 2013, so we’re just shy of a ten year anniversary of this functionality. A functionality that often confounds and annoys marketers. And it might even be crazier to recall that the guidance of the time (here’s Ken Magill) was essentially send wanted content and you’ll be just fine.Ultimately, that’s still true today, just about ten years later. Gmail’s attempt to categorize messages into the primary, social, promotions, updates or the forums tab isn’t an attempt to marginalize senders, but is instead meant to help both email senders and their recipients. Sender email messages are easily found by those most interested in them, and recipients benefit based on a categorized inbox that organizes inbound messages into coherent and easily-navigated groupings.In the past, I’ve collected and shared guidance from across the Internet on how best to “escape” the Gmail promotions tab.
Looks like GPT is down again — it’s not just you. The user interface for Google Postmaster Tools is showing a spinning wheel and nothing else, as of 9:00 am US central time on Friday, March 3rd. When this happened last time, the API remained up (so if you pull GPT data into a third party tool you are possibly unaffected) and when GPT returned, no data seemed to be lost. Hang in there — I’m sure folks at Google are aware and working on the issue.
Google Postmaster Tools, the very handy domain reputation dashboard provided free of charge from the folks behind Gmail, is having trouble right now. Since at least early afternoon on Thursday, February 9th, users have been greeted with an eternal spinning wheel after logging in. A few folks have suggested that hitting refresh a bunch of times might get you past this, but I wasn’t able to have any luck with that myself. Thus, if you’re experiencing trouble with GPT at the moment, know that it’s not just you, and I’m sure Google is working on getting everything back up and running as soon as possible.
Axios, the Washington Post, and others are reporting that the Gmail political email pilot program is coming to an end.Axios buries the lede on this one — putting the important bit (to me) at the very end: “Google’s pilot email program, which saw more than 100 political committees participate, will end January 31, and the company is evaluating next steps.”More from the Washington Post: “The company will let the program sunset at the end of January instead of prolonging it, Google’s lawyers said in a filing on Monday.” The filing is an attempt to get the RNC “unfair spam filtering” lawsuit against Google dismissed. How the shutdown of the pilot program ties to that effort, I am not equipped enough to say at the moment, but I’ll be curious to learn more.
The other day, I ran across a complaint on Linkedin. “Just saw another email go to the Promotions Folder with DKIM, SPF, and DMARC set up perfectly. Stop telling people this will fix their e-mail problems!” It’s not the first time I’ve heard this, and I can understand why the author is frustrated. But, it’s important not to miss the true point — email authentication will help to improve inbox delivery. Because it does! But there’s a nuanced explanation to go along with that. The devil truly is in the details.Email authentication is fantastic. SPF and DKIM both allow you to set yourself up as YOU in the eyes of mailbox providers — as opposed to just being one of the many clients of ESP or CRM platform X, based on a shared IP address or shared DKIM domain. This is a good thing, but it’s just the start.Setting yourself
Mike Scarcella, reporting for Reuters: Google has hired law firm Perkins Coie to help defend it against the RNC’s spam filtering lawsuit. “While Perkins long has provided legal services to the Democratic National Committee in matters of political law, and to political candidates, most of the lawyers fielded to defend against the RNC’s claims focus on privacy, security and business litigation.” Read it all here.
Google and various news outlets are reporting that Gmail had a significant outage today (Saturday, December 10th). Google reports that as of 4:16 PM UTC (10:16 AM US central time) things are on the mend, but that there’s a backlog of messages to be delivered.I can’t tell if senders found inbound delivery attempts delayed with 4xx errors, or if Google servers accepted messages then sat on them. Message delivery to the inbox, however, was definitely delayed for folks (observed by myself, too), regardless of what the backend systems were doing.
To ensure your Google Calendar invites make it to the intended destination, configure DKIM signing using these steps. The post How to get Google Calendar Invites to Pass DMARC appeared first on dmarcian.
A few months ago, Google made a splash in the political press and the email marketing space when they asked the FEC the following question: May Google launch a free and non-partisan pilot program to test Gmail design features, which will be open to authorized candidate committees, political party committees, and leadership political action committees, where spam detection as applied to messages from a pilot participant on direct feedback from the recipient rather than standard spam detection, and each pilot participant will receive information regarding the rate of emails delivered into Gmail users’ inboxes, as long as the pilot will rely predominantly participant is in compliance with the program’s requirements?Google’s letter to the FEC (.pdf link) The letter is actually worth a read as many of the general press reports about the request focused on Google asking the FEC to allow politicians to spam freely. I mostly avoided discussions about
Here is the scenario. Maybe you’ve just gotten a bounce message that looks like this:Aug 25 11:20:24 s1 postfix/smtp[26906]: 98299221BB: to=, relay=gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.141.27]:25, delay=1.2, delays=0.04/0.77/0.2/0.21, dsn=5.7.1, status=bounced (host gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com[142.250.141.27] said: 550-5.7.1 [206.125.175.2] Our system has detected that this message is not RFC 550-5.7.1 5322 compliant: duplicate headers. To reduce the amount of spam sent 550-5.7.1 to Gmail, this message has been blocked. Please review 550 5.7.1 RFC 5322 specifications for more information. j6-20020a637a46000000b0042b3a763e76si3563504pgn.127 – gsmtp (in reply to end of DATA command))Or perhaps it looks like this:Aug 25 12:48:59 s1 postfix/smtp[14180]: C90492056B: to=, relay=aspmx.l.google.com[142.250.141.27]:25, delay=0.69, delays=0.08/0/0.39/0.22, dsn=5.7.1, status=bounced (host aspmx.l.google.com[142.250.141.27] said: 550-5.7.1 [206.125.175.2] Our system has detected that this message is not RFC 550-5.7.1 5322 compliant: 550-5.7.1 Multiple ‘From’ headers found. 550-5.7.1 To reduce the amount of spam sent to Gmail, this message has been 550-5.7.1 blocked. Please visit 550-5.7.1 https://support.google.com/mail/?p=RfcMessageNonCompliant 550 5.7.1 and review RFC 5322 specifications for more information.