I have a question about the email deliverability to primarily Gmail and to some extent, Yahoo and Outlook email users. It’s a bit long since I’d like to lay down what I’ve done and tried so far, so please bear with me.
The Issue: Our marketing emails (in newsletter format, in hotel industry) using several email IaaS and PaaS are ending up in spam for Gmail users. About 10% will receive in Promotions tab.
The Providers: Here are the email IaaS and PaaS services I have been trying so far.
- SendGrid (we are using their email API)
- SparkPost
- Mailgun
- ElasticEmail
With each platform:
I’ve tried both our own dedicated IP addresses AND the platforms’ shared IPs. New domains that haven’t been used to send emails Changed contents of the email completely, including the HTML code (by designing new ones, just in case it’s an issue) DKIM, SPF and all are setup correctly for each domains we used
I’ve checked all the domains and IPs (both dedicated and shared) against known blacklists and spams using MXTools and such. Everything is okay.
We also checked the emails we’re sending using:
- www.isnotspam.com
- www.mail-tester.com
Both are recommended by SendGrid. We score highly on both, and according to the analysis results from both, our emails are not considered spam.
We’d also checked our domains and all IPs (both dedicated and shared, from any platforms we mentioned above) using SenderScore. Everything is fine here too.
For dedicated IPs, we did the warm up too. But the issue is, even if we are sending just 1-10 emails for testing and warm up, they do end up in Spam. We aren’t even sending to anyone unsolicited. In fact, just for testing purposes, we are sending emails to multiple email addresses owned by our internal team.
I’d talked at length with support team from SendGrid. After checking everything they could think of, they also stated that they can’t find anything amiss with our configs, settings, IP and domain reputation and their own infrastucture.
So what gives? I am really out of idea. Please help!
Thanks.