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Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

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Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#141

Post by JimDabell »

dexwiz wrote: post #68
darylteo wrote: post #32

How does this interact with transactional emails / 2FA / password resets? If 5000 people request a 2fa code in a month, I have to give them a unsubscribe header as well? Or magic login links? If I don't provide a list-unsubscribe header: do these emails then get blocked and noone can log in ? If I provide a list-unsubscribe header, what is the expected behaviour if they do click the Unsubscribe button? - tell them th…

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers?

Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months. If emails like that aren’t safe from Google’s spam filter, then no emails are safe from Google’s spam filter.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#142

Post by Wicher »

behringer wrote: post #69
stubish wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kicking off a chain of emails a user cannot easily opt out of could well be the sort of emails users want to lose. There probably should be a one-click 'stop emailing me' button, for this and future purchases. Which would be a support burden, yes.

I watch for the subject line. I don't actually care what the content says...

So... let's assume many users do this, and let's assume Google factors in the opening rate into the transactional-email-likeness score, and that transactional-email-senders become widely aware of this...

Then senders' incentive will become to make the subject line into clickbait for the content, so that you'll open the message. So instead of subjects like "Order placed", "Order paid", "Order shipped", "Order out for delivery" you'll get uniform subjects along the lines of "IMPORTANT UPDATE TO YOUR ORDER". You will lose efficiency getting through your emails, and over time the metric will lose its indicativeness. Everybody loses.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#143

Post by petre »

dtech wrote: post #73
petre wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Github unsubscribe is behind a login. Very annoying. We have an account with a company e-mail that is an alias to admins and it was subscribed to a few issues. One morning I got so annoyed with Thunderbird's not working message filters that I took the time to look up the password, login, unsubscribe and disable all nuisance e-mail communication.

That is not marketing email though

Of course. But if I do my own service that notifies clients over e-mail, then it is "marketing e-mail".

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#144

Post by josephg »

jcrites wrote: post #103
MaxGabriel wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% open rate on transactional emails feels too high to me. Something like an e-commerce purchase might kick off multiple emails (purchase made, shipped, arrived), none of which the user opens

Sorry, to clarify, I only mean this particular type of transactional email: password reset, MFA. But even for other types of transactional emails, like shipment confirmations, I would expect the open rate to be much higher and/or the complaint rate to be much lower than for marketing email.

It’s also not a bad idea to provide an unsubscribe option for shipment updates.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#145

Post by josephg »

Semaphor wrote: post #111
wl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe transactional emails don't need an unsubscribe link like marketing emails, but they do need a "not my account; please stop" link to avoid the spam button.

Lack of opt-in into those will have me keep marking those as spam. Just like those US political newsletters that also don’t feel like they need to verify mails.

US political emails are even more annoying when you aren’t American. I flag all that stuff as spam without hesitation. If you do that, I hope your entire domain ends up flagged as spam.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#146

Post by josephg »

andersa wrote: post #123
wl wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe transactional emails don't need an unsubscribe link like marketing emails, but they do need a "not my account; please stop" link to avoid the spam button.

Why would you be receiving transactional emails for an account that isn't yours?

Hah. I have josephg@gmail. I sometimes wake up to threads of 6+ password reset attempts over an hour from someone who doesn’t know their own email address. For a couple years I got pay stubs. And monthly cell phone invoices from India.

I think that email address gets more email for other people than email for me at this point.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#147

Post by cj »

JimDabell wrote: post #141
dexwiz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months…

I don’t disagree with you, but before assuming it’s the fault of gmail classifier I would look at Google Workspace admin configuration. There are a lot of settings that admins can tweak and toggle that can mess with email deliverability. You can even create specific rules that only apply when users within the same workspace are emailing each other.

Google Workspace can even be configured to use an external smtp service behind the scenes. Can also be configured to proxy emails through 3rd parties (in which case the email might be leaving the Google ecosystem and then reentering it from a non-Google IP). There’s a lot of silly (seemingly unnecessary) features on the admin side that could trip up a spam filter.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#148

Post by CPLX »

JimDabell wrote: post #141
dexwiz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months…

Yeah that happens all the time, to the point where I had to add specific rules in Google Workspace to never send those to spam. Same with other transactional emails like receipts from some places that I had marked as "not spam" 4 times and Google still couldn't figure out the next one.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#149

Post by PennRobotics »

JimDabell wrote: post #141
dexwiz wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers? Don’t put Google on a pedestal. I’ve seen Google Workspace classify an individual email sent from one colleague to another as spam. Both perfectly legitimate users in the same account / domain. No weird trigger words like Viagra. Just a run-of-the-mill email about work, between two colleagues who had been emailing each other for months…

Yeah, something wrong with the filter.

Google marked several Samsung mobile phone order confirmation emails as phishing messages a week or two ago. Nobody sells more Android phones than Samsung, so they should be one of Google's top partners to accommodate correctly 100% of the time.

Re: Gmail and Yahoo’s 2024 inbox protections and what they mean for email programs

#150

Post by ajsnigrutin »

dexwiz wrote: post #68
darylteo wrote: post #32

How does this interact with transactional emails / 2FA / password resets? If 5000 people request a 2fa code in a month, I have to give them a unsubscribe header as well? Or magic login links? If I don't provide a list-unsubscribe header: do these emails then get blocked and noone can log in ? If I provide a list-unsubscribe header, what is the expected behaviour if they do click the Unsubscribe button? - tell them th…

Its 5000/day for marketing, and if you are sending 5000 emails a day, you probably should have unsubscribe links. https://support.google.com/mail/answer/81126#requirements-5k You also need a link, not just list-unsubscribe, and it is specifically for marketing emails. In my experience, Google is pretty accurate in figuring out transactional versus marketing. They don't tell their heuristics, but you don't think engin…

> you don't think engineers who build web crawlers cannot build email classifiers?

Nope, I don't. So many things get constantly marked as spam in my inbox, even server notifications, from the same domain, same daily emails, marked repeatedly as "not spam", and added to address book.

Then there's the second problem of google support... your 2fa passwords, email-authentications, password reset links, etc. will be sent out, gmail will send them to spam, your users won't see/find the email, and there's nothing you can do... noone to call at google that would actually listen and try to do anything, no penalties if they don't do anything, only hope that your service is large enough that it gets some traction on twitter or here and some random googler sees it.

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