Is there no way to protest the email spam filter rules of Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook?

SPF, DKIM, & DMARC are all fine. I'm using Amazon SES. Their spam filters are awful and are harming what I feel is a very important project.

They're permanently (I waited over a month) sending all emails from a shared Amazon SES IP range to spam because 0.3% of users who received an email from that IP marked it as spam instead of unsubscribing... I can't believe they think that is a reasonable thing to do... People were taught for years to mark emails as spam instead of unsubscribing since unsubscribing can confirm your email to spammers. 1% of people may also simply be dumb, or may be sabotaging your business on purpose. Making such a drastic decision based on less than half of 1% of email recipients seems ridiculous.

They're allowing the 1% lowest common denominator to determine what the other 99% are allowed to see.

"60% of the population have an IQ under 85; this is not a small issue." - Richard Haier https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/IQ_distribution.svg/1024px-IQ_distribution.svg.png

"Too many people are ignorant or rude or both and use the SPAM button as a convenient way to organize their email" https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6901723/

I've done everything in my power to highlight the option to unsubscribe instead of mark an email as spam, including the ridiculous step of opening the email with "You're receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don't want any more" instead of "Hi, here are the details of an important update".

For years, I've been responding to people who applied via a google form on our website (1.2+ million at this point). When simply sending a first email telling them "you did or did not qualify", the Amazon SES complaint rate has always averaged between 0.3% and 0.5%, and the Google Postmaster rate always jumps between 0%-2%. There's nothing that can be done to bring the rates down besides sending people unnecessary emails in order to lower the average. So sending people actual spam is the only way to decrease the spam rate below that extremely low level...

There are times when 50% of my *incoming* [gmail] emails go to spam. When I contacted Outlook about this their response went to my Outlook junk folder.

Their spam filters are horrible and they don't seem to care at all. And it's causing major problems with a majority of people missing important emails. Eg: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/02/a-spam-folder-may-have-foiled-andretti-cadillacs-f1-entry/

Yahoo said I should request a better IP pool from Amazon SES. I said:

Amazon SES does not have an option to "request a better IP pool". Asking them to assign another IP pool to my account doesn't seem like a valid solution anyway. There's no reason to believe that their other IP pools aren't experiencing the same problem, or will experience the same problem at any given point. I'm very surprised that your system is this unsophisticated. I should be able to use Amazon SES without all my emails going to spam.

I searched Hacker News and found loads of other people with the same problem https://hn.algolia.com/?q=email+spam

I found a way to submit bulk mail appeals to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. (https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/why-are-my-emails-going-to-spam/). I think my appeal to Gmail worked (had to wait a few weeks), but Outlook and Yahoo basically just told me "Too bad, your IP pool is bad".

If anyone sends me an email, and it's from a company I have no business or account with, they get marked as spam. That is the digital equivalent of walking up to someone's door and annoying me. The fact it's allowed for IRL homes and for physical mail boggles my mjnd.

That seems off-topic. I'm not cold-emailing people. They applied on our website.

> Also, the whole point of using SES is for them to handle the blacklist stuff.

Since Amazon themselves in their documentation describe using a dedicated IP address as the way to avoid the reputational impact of other Amazon SES customers you and your service provider seem to have a very different view of what service they are providing you.

I have not found a way to do that with Google Forms, so the first email I send them is telling them whether or not they passed. That email has an unsubscribe link.