What to do about Gmail blocking my email?

It's not fair, it is legal, and there's nothing you can do about it. You will never be able to talk to a human at Google about this. Even paying customers of their all-important ad business can't really talk to helpful humans about things.

The only solution is to support US elected officials who want to break up Google. There is no solution for you in particular.

The only practical solution: Don't try to run your own mail server.

I manage a service that sends about 25k emails daily using SES (AWS) with some dedicated IPs. Despite everything done right wrt spf/dkim/dmarc, IP reputation warm up etc, we still run into these issues from time to time with multiple providers. Outlook.com just says 'it is being delivered' and then just deletes the email or something, some local ISPs do that too. And then deny it when you try to 'debug' the issue.

This is simply how email delivery 'works' anno 2022 unfrotunatly

Same exact issue, I could write the exact same thing word for word. I even "contacted Gmail support" 3 weeks ago to see if I could get anywhere on it, whatever void that message went to. Same "no data" in Postmaster Tools presumably because of my low volume, messages just variously go to spam in Gmail. The last one was a message to 9 Gmail recipients I had never contacted before which I guess was the issue.

It's been so frustrating that I'm contemplating going back to a provider, or at the very least paying for one of the "warmup services" mentioned here. If anyone has experience with those for non-business I'd love to read about it.

From what I've seen gmail follows user patterns than all this technical mumbo jumbo.

So for a small business owner even 1 person hitting the spam button can be a kiss of death for deliverablity (and I know people irl who think hitting spam and delete are the same thing ).

Basically long story short, if you send 100 emails and 10 people open your email and click on something there is a high probability that the remaining 90 are also going in the primary inbox. Otoh if 2 people were to click the spam button then high chances are rest 98 are also going to spam and soon enough you'll be branded as such.

Its why inbox warmup services are so popular nowadays. While I disagree with such practices in theory as most often they are means to abuse filters, your case seems legit and so you may have some luck with that.

Gmail algorithm doesn't depend entirely on those factors you mention, it's a message per message basis, the problem is that people are marking you as spam. You have to check your emails and detect what's triggering the spam filter inside the content, give it some time to send the next one, and clean your list urgently, even confirming your users if they want to be in your list.

Don't forget: complain to your Senators and Representatives, both local and national, mention it as an antitrust violation (because it is).

If you have a new email server you have to do domain warmup. That basically entails sending out emails to show ESPs like Google that they aren't spam. I did this at a previous job, we would have email lists of millions of people and have a monthly plan where the first day we send emails to 1000 users, second day 2000, until at the end of the month we send to all. We'd get blacklisted sometimes and then have to apply to be whitelisted. It is not easy.

Have you checked https://postmaster.google.com/?

Could there be some content in the emails that triggers spam filters? Are the usernames or domain something that might trigger it? Is your server time correct?

It might also be that many users have marked emails from the domain as spam (I know of that happening with competitors signing up to newsletters etc. just to mark them as spam).

Look for something like email reputation on Upwork, or mechanical turk: you send email to 1000 mechanical turk worker's Gmails, and they click "Not Spam" in their Spam folder, to retrain Google's AI.

Looking at your replies to previous suggestions, I'm gonna assume your previous messages weren't reported as spam, like you say. So why not try emailing people who use Gmail and Google Workplace (née GSuite/GApps/GAFYD) and asking them to find your message in Spam and mark as Not Spam?

I'll happily help. Email me at ST.CyberRabbi@richi.uk (temporary alias—will stop working after a few days). Then reply here, so I remember to go look for it.

gmail has a ridiculous anti-spam, it should use AI and cool stuff but it just ignore most of the email just by IP... My stack is also perfect but the provider i use sometimes ends up in a "light" blacklist due to some spammer not being blocker swiftly.

check your ip here: https://multirbl.valli.org/lookup/

Totally okay, otherwise how you'd prevent spam? trust should not be a given, it should be developed over time.

I don't see how anti-trust apply to this, the barrier of entry to hosting emails is not too high, its just not low enough to be done in an evening, that's like saying needing to buy car washing machines to have a car washer is an anti-trust issue.

Now considering the email going to spam, try different email clients.

Does anyone know if only Google accounts are being affected? I have a customer who claims his emails suddenly started all going into spam folders. The address isn't blacklisted. The mail IS getting delivered. Other than looking at the email contents, how to everyday, common web clients detect spam?

think about what the PM of antispam at Gmail is optimizing for. their job is to provide defense against adversarial spammers.

anything trivial for you to do to get into someone's inbox can also be trivial for spammers. they'll have a bot that do it 1000 times a day. Gmail can't stop spam altogether so the general strategy is to try to make it as painful and expensive as possible to deter the marginal spammers.

any sort of spam at scale is easier to detect. that's why most marginal spam happens with new IP. similar issue in the past with hacked Gmail accounts. this is where google is cracking down harder and why you're running into these issues.

Try a mailwarmer to improve your sender score - gmass.co/warmup worked for me before

Same problem here. Small mail host on my own domain.

Everything is set up perfectly, mail-tester.com gives it 10/10, and last week Gmail suddenly starts hard bouncing emails for one day and delivers to spam folder after that. Three days later everything is back to normal.

How? Why?

Have you tried testing with a subdomain, say mail.domain.com?

Have the domain ever been on a rbl?

pay for a mail warmer service