Now Big Email Provider are marking those emails as spam. Even though
- every single email we send is an important email that our users really want to read - our email is following all known to us good practices - our domain has never been used to send any unsolicited emails ever - they are simple plain-text emails without links - we usually send not more than 3-5 emails a day to Big Email Provider - we ask our customers to mark them as "Not Spam" and they claim they do so.
Big email providers refuse to not mark our emails as a spam. "We know it's not a spam, but we are still going to mark them as spam to our customers and we won't tell you why."
It's hard to calculate the exact damages but it does damage our reputation because frequently pepole don't check spam and send us angry emails or publicly complain that they haven't received an email for a week. (Our replies to these emails aren't sent to spam).
Is there any precedence where someone has succesfully managed to force Big Email Provider to not mark legit emails as spam or have there been any lawsuits anywhere around this topic?
Edit: we do have proper dns settings, send emails from big email provider ourselves and did our due diligence including discussing topic with external experts etc. For the purpose of the question please assume that we do everything by the book and the reasons for the issue are hidden even from the big company in their ai- based spam filters. We did get response from those providers that "your emails are fine, you do everything right, but our ai marks them as spam and we can't and won't do anything about it"
I would suggest sending a simple HTML part along with your plaintext part.
Make sure you're handling bounces and if you can do feedback loop programs[1], do those as well.
Consider making your message a bit longer and specific to your business, so if there's any Bayesian stuff, you might get good vibes. Include your business name and url, etc.
Make sure your mail looks like a real email and not a machine generated low effort mail; have a reasonable subject, put the user's name (as you know it) in to To: with quotes, do something nice for From and Reply-To... etc.
[1] https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6254652?hl=en Google program as example, other large services may have similar
I don't recommend actually following these guidelines to the whims of Google although it might be good practice for some applications. But this is again not against spam, there are other interests involved here and not necessarily to the interest of the users and the mechanism can be used to make email exclusive overall.
If it is just a spam filter, you might want to include some personal information although the filters have become far more aggressive because they had to. Scammers already use personalized info to send out fake mails. If you have a customer where this happened perhaps ask their IT what methods they are using. Perhaps adjusting the mail for a popular methods of spam filtering can solve the problem.
It can be anything from trigger words in the subject/content to the email being image heavy etc.
Usually checking the headers of the email when it's been sent to spam can identify why.
To answer your question, no you cannot force them to do anything. Either fix it yourself or hire someone who can fix it for you.
If not, you must check your email server's reputation, check you are not using trash netblocks like linode, and check you follow best practices like having a sane RDNS for your outbound mail server.
Some places check there is a valid MX that has a sane HELO matching the sender.
In short stop seeing this as 'big email' problem and as a technical quality issue about your mail arrangements which you do have control over.
Or a self-hosted server? If so, have you checked if you're on a blacklist or something that would lead to providers marking it as spam (or refuse delivery altogether)?
If your customers mark something as NOT spam, I don't think that will do anything at the server end unless they have also set up Sieve?
How are those different to the emails that are marked as spam? Therein may lie a clue as to what is causing the problem.
Fighting big companies is a David vs Goliath battle. Except in the world of lawyers and deep corporate pockets, the Davids end up being chewed up and spat out.
It's the world we live in. Your customers are used to it.
Most people are willing to hunt in spam folders for transactional email they care about.