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Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

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Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#11

Post by oscgam1 »

esperent wrote: post #9
oscgam1 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the reply. I Agree that marketing email are super obnoxious. In the very few instances that we send (e.g. black Friday), we include an unsubscribe link :) Yes, we are informing our customers to flag us as not spam. However, our domain reputation is 100% (google's postmaster) according to Google's support, this doesn't seem to be the case. We will continue informing our customers and helping them set filter…

Do you send unsolicited mail that customers didn't specifically sign up for? I get so much of this, I sign up for a service to check it out, decide it's not actually a good fit for me but in the process of signing up the company added my email to loads of mailing lists like product updates, advertising, policy changes, etc. etc. The company doesn't see this as spam. However, it is spam and whenever I receive any of t…

>Do you send unsolicited mail that customers didn't specifically sign up for? No

I agree mails should be opt in (we do it that way). We send some transactional emails such as forget password, purchase receipts, and welcome email.

We already had a good domain reputation, that's why the situation is so difficult to fix.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#13

Post by sli »

> ..., and Google customer support doesn't seem able to identify the issue.

This cannot be anything but a lie, right? I refuse to believe that there's no way they can't just view some sample emails and approve it manually if it's all above board. I definitely believe they simply do not care. But unable? No way.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#16

Post by jasfi »

Use an additional email testing tool, e.g. MailTester: https://www.mail-tester.com/

There are others too, many have a free quota that you can use a few times a day. With MailTester you can retest the same email after changing things as well.

Perhaps Postmaster missed something.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#17

Post by jfoster »

oscgam1 wrote: post #11
esperent wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you send unsolicited mail that customers didn't specifically sign up for? I get so much of this, I sign up for a service to check it out, decide it's not actually a good fit for me but in the process of signing up the company added my email to loads of mailing lists like product updates, advertising, policy changes, etc. etc. The company doesn't see this as spam. However, it is spam and whenever I receive any of t…

>Do you send unsolicited mail that customers didn't specifically sign up for? No I agree mails should be opt in (we do it that way). We send some transactional emails such as forget password, purchase receipts, and welcome email. We already had a good domain reputation, that's why the situation is so difficult to fix.

Do users have to verify their email address to get onto your lists?

I get mail from lots of real businesses, but I never engaged with them, so they're marked as spam.

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#18

Post by kazinator »

> Is there something else we should be doing?

Trying different SMTP providers, probably.

Your mail domain is something that appears in the From: header of your e-mails.

However, mails can be rejected as spam even without any of the headers or body of the e-mail being seen, at the SMTP level, and that could have to do with who you route your mail through, or who your sending or forwarding mail servers are co-located with in the same IP block. IP addresses which have nothing to do with each other can tarnish each other's e-mail sending "reputation".

Re: Ask HN: What to do when Google is about to kill your business?

#20

Post by farseer »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #5

>the emails are only sent when the customer selects to receive an email, and we include a visible unsubscribe link. Just for what it's worth, sometimes when a company's marketing is really obnoxious I'll mark it as spam just to fuck with them. If there are enough people doing that, one could imagine that Google's internal filters would begin seeing the whole domain, or some random boilerplate string in the emails as…

I do this too, especially those who tricked me into signing me up using a dark pattern
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