If you have all of your authentication and unsub headers set up correctly, and Gmail is still rejecting email that you send from Microsoft (Outlook, Exchange, 365, etc.), here's why. First, you're not crazy and you're not doing anything wrong. It's real, it's on the Gmail side, and there's a reason.
The new 2024 email sending requirements for Google and Yahoo (collectively being called "Yahoogle", we guess that's their celebrity couple name) are causing a lot of concern among email senders, but they needn't. In fact, the odds are good that you are already doing everything that you need to, or, if you aren't, you already know that you should be. The bottom line is that the general requirements are simply: Have proper authentication set up (SPF, DKIM, and DMARC - yes, all three), have the required one-click unsubscribe link in your headers in all of your bulk email, and keep your spam complaint rate down in the negligible zone (more on that later).
If you have the feeling that bot clicks seem to be an increasing problem in the email marketing world, well, you're not alone. Email bots, also referred to as server bots, are automated systems which click on the links contained in email. Whether there has been a dramatic increase in actual bot clicks, or just in the awareness of them, they are definitely a thing.
Here's a random question that we were asked "We just got an email with an unsubscribe link going to kmail-lists.com; who is behind kmail-lists?" It turns out that it's pretty hard for at least the average person to figure out who is responsible for the kmail-lists.com domain; the ESP behind kmail-lists.com is Klaviyo, who is an ESP for primarily B2C businesses, in fact they are a primary competitor to Shopify, who used to dominate the B2C ('business to consumer') and D2C 'direct to consumer') ESP space.
Sending email from a decoy, pass-through email domain which forwards to a primary domain is never a good idea. (Some people call this a 'dummy domain', but that's actually something different.) What they do is set up a decoy domain and send their cold email from it, with links in the cold email which point to their primary domain. They do it this way in an effort to protect the reputation of their primary domain, aren't they so clever? Here's the thing; actually two things: 1. It doesn't work, it will still drag down their primary domain's reputation, and 2. it doesn't work because they are spamming. Calling it "cold email" when what you've done is scraped or purchased an email address and put it on a mailing list without consent is spam, no matter how much you try to polish it up and call it something else.
Just as with any other industry, the email deliverability and email marketing industries have their own […]
Mailchimp has just announced a brand new Shopify integration. Now you may be wondering "Wait a minute, hasn't Mailchimp integrated with Shopify all along?" The answer is that Mailchimp used to have a Shopify integration, but they had discontinued it. In fact, Mailchimp left Shopify 2 1/2 years ago when, in 2019, Mailchimp and Shopify had a rather public and unamicable divorce.
Often the way that you find out that a user's email address is no longer valid is that you get a bounce back ("user not found"). But sometimes a user will switch email addresses, and they will actually try to notify you. What do you do then?