Comment by fmx
1 day ago
GMail disagrees with you, because GMail users disagree with you. They are clicking "report spam" on your emails. Whether or not you think what you're sending is spam, the recipients think it is, and that's what matters. (Based on the other comments in this thread it's not hard to see why they might think so.)
This is not always the case.
Last week, my monitoring system sent me 20k emails in a few hours in response to a server attack.
When those hit my gmail inbox, gmail marked them all as spam. Myself, the user, did not mark them as spam. Gmail did that for me. But their reputation system is behaving as if 20k people marked 20k emails from us as spam.
In response to those 20k emails marked as spam, now our domain sender reputation with gmail is LOW, and our low volume of legitimate email with customers goes to their spam folders.
The gmail client gives me no way to unmark these messages as spam, except to click on each message, one at a time, and dig into a submenu to find the "Not spam" button.
Users definitely click "report spam" in large numbers on things that are not spam. At work we've long had problems of getting reported for spam when the only things we send are:
• A receipt when a person comes to our site and purchases something.
• Their license key if what they purchased requires a license key.
• Replies if they send email to customer support.
• If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews or a notice that it was declined if the charge does not go through. This is required by the major credit card companies.
• If they have an automatically renewing subscription and they are on a plan other than monthly we send a reminder before it tries to renew. This is required by the major credit card companies and by the consumer protection laws in many jurisdictions.
> If they have purchased an automatically renewing subscription we email a receipt after it renews (..) This is required by the major credit card companies.
The problem here is that "we are legally required to send it" and "our customers want to receive it" aren't necessarily the same thing. I'd probably be pretty annoyed by those if I had more than a few subscriptions!
if you are a big Google adwords customer you ask them to let you spam users
that is the idea of the Gmail business. it's not complicated.
I have a really simple algorithm to reporting something as spam:
> Was this email solicited by me?
The author describes unsolicited emails and somehow misses the point that spam is a term for unsolicited emails.
The reminder email in your list sounds unsolicited, so I'd probably report that one as spam as well. I wasn't aware it was mandatory, probably because it's not where I live.
My transactional inboxes are mostly clean as a result. My "spam" inbox, however, is full of crap (the email I use to sign up to freemium services).
You don’t want people reminding you that their about to charge you money and give you an opportunity to cancel the subscription?
Surely that’s a lot less hassle for all involved than having to get your bank to issue chargebacks on subscription renewals you forgot about?
I would describe myself as strict and dogmatic about email etiquette and consent as they come, but I am with avianlyric about the subscription reminders.
Legal requirements aside — when I have an ongoing business relationship with a company, "we are about to take money from you again" is an expected, useful and welcome message.