Are you noticing more important emails going to spam? Unfortunately, it’s to be expected, given some changes announced by major email providers Google and Yahoo, which have begun to take effect.
Regardless of how much work your marketing partner – even if it’s us! – put into properly configuring and optimizing YOUR email, we can’t control what others do with their emails. If the folks sending you emails don’t abide by the standards set forth by the almighty email gods, there isn’t much we can do for them.
In some cases, we may be able to add certain email addresses to a safe sender list (sometimes called a whitelist), but that’s not a cure-all fix for this issue. If you have important emails going to spam, there’s a couple of things you can do but a lot of it will rely on the reputation the sender has with email providers.
Why are important emails going to spam?
Both Google and Yahoo have tightened up their email security measures to protect users from phishing and spam. This includes stricter enforcement of authentication protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. When an email isn’t properly authenticated, it’s more likely to be flagged as suspicious and sent to your spam folder.
Here’s a breakdown of what these changes entail:
- Stricter Spam Filtering Criteria: Google and Yahoo aim to enhance security and reduce spam by implementing stricter criteria for email filtering, which could impact how emails are delivered to inboxes versus spam folders.
- Authentication Requirements: Bulk senders will be required to authenticate their emails to demonstrate legitimacy and prevent phishing scams.
- Easy Unsubscribe: Mail providers will enforce easy unsubscribe options for recipients, making it harder for spammers to maintain unwanted lists.
- Spam Thresholds: To further protect users, email providers will enforce a spam rate threshold that senders must stay under, ensuring email recipients aren’t bombarded with unwanted messages
- Impact on Users: These changes could affect the way emails are delivered to your inbox or spam folder, so you may see emails that were previously delivered to your inbox ending up in spam, or vice versa.
How this affects you
- For Your Inbox: You might see more legitimate emails landing in your spam folder simply because the sender hasn’t updated their settings.
- For Your Business: While we continue to optimize your email setup, we can only control our own configuration. Other senders not following these updated standards may inadvertently affect your email experience. There are some things we can do to help mitigate the impact of this issue on your daily work, such as adding specific emails to “safe sender” lists (sometimes called whitelists) and reducing your “SPAM score” failure threshold.
What can you do?
- Safe Sender Lists: In some cases, adding key contacts to your safe sender list (aka whitelist) can help prevent important emails going to spam, but this isn’t a foolproof solution.
- Stay Alert: Keep an eye on your spam folder and mark any misdirected emails as “Not Spam” to help train your email provider.
- Feedback & Support: If you’re a client of ours and have concerns or notice persistent issues, let us know. We’re here to help you navigate these changes and minimize any disruption. We can adjust your SPAM Score failure threshold if needed, but that may result in more false negatives, even while reducing the number of false positives, so we want to adjust this setting judiciously.
For 2oddballs Creative clients and prospective clients
To those of us already working with us, thank you for your understanding as we all adjust to these necessary changes! We’re committed to ensuring that your communication platforms remain secure and effective. If you have any questions or need further assistance, please don’t hesitate to reach out.
To those considering us, we do our best to keep our clients ahead of big changes like this and keep them updated with blogs just like this one. If you stumbled upon this looking for help, we hope this did the job! However, if you’re finding it difficult to keep up with everything on your own, we welcome a call or message to see how we can help and get a free quote!
