Email Deliverability Best Practices: GMail domains

Gmail’s success can be attributed to their focus on their users' interest. Gmail ensures that user engagement and actions directly affect your deliverability. To protect their users, GMail does not not publish information about how messages are filtered or evaluating, providing only general guidelines on email sending.

Troubleshooting Gmail deliverability issues can be tricky. Follow these guidelines for tackling common Gmail delivery issues and ensure your messages don’t fall victim to Gmail’s spam folder.

Let Google Be Your Guide

Although there’s no “GMail hotline” to call, Google offers guidance on their expectations surrounding sending configuration and practices - these include elements of authentication, identification, subscription processes, unsubscribes, formatting, third-party senders, and affiliate marketing. A few key points:

• Authentication and Identification. Gmail recommends sending from the same IP address consistently—ensuring you have valid DNS — and using a consistent from address for every send. Salesforce Marketing Cloud users are automatically covered on all these fronts.
• Subscription Processes. Gmail suggests that opt-in is the one “true path” to successful delivery. Double opt-in confirmation (i.e. sending a follow-up message to confirm each subscription on your list) and/or unchecked opt-in are recommended. Additionally, Gmail discourages third-party lists or opt-in check boxes that are pre-checked by default.
• Unsubscribes. Google requires that unsubscribes be easy and hassle-free for the end user. Senders should obtain ongoing confirmation from their subscribers that they want to continue receiving communications. Marketing Cloud helps you adhere to the technical aspects of unsubscribe recommendations. For example, we automatically mark an address as undeliverable after multiple bounces.

To understand how Marketing Cloud helps you meet GMail sender guidelines, see our page on Bulk Sender Guidelines for Marketing Cloud Engagement.

New sender? Don’t forget IP address warming.

Spammers tend to cycle through sending IPs and send out as many emails as possible. Once they're blocked, the cycle is repeated — with new addresses.

Consequently, email service providers (ESPs) limit the message volume on IPs with no sender reputation. Emails coming from cold addresses raise eyebrows. ESPs closely observe volume originating from new IP addresses. So, if you send an email to every prospect in your database right away, it is a red flag for spam monitors.

IP warming is the process of gradually increasing the volume of mail sent with a dedicated IP address. The goal is to build up approximately 30 days of desirable sending history.

If you’re new to your Marketing Cloud sending IP address, make sure you’ve properly gone through the IP warming process to build up that proper and desirable history.

Test Email Content

To determine whether delivery issues are related to content, perform a “neutral content test” using existing sending infrastructure (i.e., IP Address, From Address, Sending Domain). Send a basic, plain email from Marketing Cloud to your personal Gmail address. 

When composing that neutral content message, don’t use your usual template, content or logos - keep it simple and generic. Write a brief paragraph of text, properly format it in HTML, add a header or footer, and don’t include much more than that.

If the neutral content test is successfully delivered, content may be implicated. To troubleshoot further:

• Segment content into parts. For example, send the first half and final half of your email to your test account as two separate messages to identify which sections are reaching the inbox.
• If both sections of your content fail to reach the inbox, continue dividing the email into smaller pieces and resend.
• Once you have identified the problematic segment, divide that particular content down even further.
• Repeat this process with subsequently smaller sections of content until you can pinpoint exactly what content is driving the spam filtering issue.

Keep in mind that offending content may be related to URLs or images— not necessarily related to specific words or phrases used in the email body.

Recommend that subscribers engage and click “Not spam.”

Google previously shared the following about filtering: 

“While Gmail works hard to deliver all legitimate mail to a user’s inbox, it’s possible that some legitimate messages may be marked as spam. Gmail does not accept ‘whitelisting’ requests from bulk senders, and we can’t guarantee that all of your messages will bypass our spam filters. To make sure our users receive all the mail they’d like to, we’ve provided them with a method for sending us feedback about messages flagged as spam—users have the option of clicking a ‘Not spam’ button for each message flagged by our spam filters.

We listen to users’ reports, and correct problems in order to provide them with the best user experience. As long as our users don’t consider your mail as spam, you shouldn’t have inbox delivery problems.”

What this means for you:

• Ensure all recipients are engaged with you and want to receive your email.

• Permission achieved through opt-in is key. At the root of deliverability success is relevant information sent at an appropriate frequency to subscribers who want to receive it. As a sender, your actions control the development of your sender reputation, which ultimately affects your ability to reach the inbox at Gmail (and other ISPs). Sending to subscribers who anticipate and want your email is the best way to decrease complaints, develop a good sender reputation, and reach the inbox.

Encourage subscribers to interact and respond to your email messages. Clicking on links in a message and clicking on the “Not Spam” button (in the case of a message delivered to the spam folder) both go a long way to improving your ability to deliver mail to the Gmail inbox successfully.

Only Email Engaged Subscribers

Adapt sending practices to ensure you email only subscribers who want to hear from you. Gmail is acutely sensitive to user feedback, so sending to unengaged recipients increases the risk of spam placement. Gmail announced enforcement of an inactive account policy beginning in December 2023, which could lead to an increased prevalence of bad address bounces for stale subscriber segments that haven’t seen actively engagement.

Contacting Google

While it's not possible to discuss deliverability issues directly with a Google representative, you can submit the Sender Contact Form to ask for reconsideration of spam placement.

To do that, visit the Sender Contact Form and follow these steps:

• Populate the form with your contact info and select the checkbox for “Your messages are incorrectly classified as Spam or Phishing.”
• On the net page, complete the Issue Summary and Issue Description fields.
• Paste a full email message, with full headers, into the next field as directed. The email message must be one that was sent to a Gmail or Google Apps account. It must not be older than a few days old. It must include full email headers.

To retrieve the message source for a Gmail message, select View Original from the context menu. A new window will open with the full email source. 

After you submitting the form:

• Google will not respond directly.
• They will, however, review the submission, which can take up to 15 days.
• If, upon review, they agree that reported messages should not be delivered to spam, an adjustment is made. 

If you need help gathering information needed for these requests, submit a support ticket explaining that you’d like help with a Gmail remediation request and we will assist.