Why Your Gsuite Emails Are Going To Spam
Tired of clients not seeing your emails? Worried it looks unprofessional if your emails go to the spam folder? In that case, read on…
This is one of the top questions I receive from both clients and friends. Since I use Gsuite and almost everyone who asks me this does too, I’m going to focus on that.
With 5+ years of large scale cold-email campaigns, I have learned A LOT about the technical ins and outs of email delivery. So I’m now the “go to” guy for requests about even the most basic email delivery stuff. Oh well…
The bitter truth about this issue is that there is no such thing as 100% email delivery. It just doesn’t exist, even for the big guys, and certainly not with Gsuite. But there are some easy fixes that are often ignored that can get you dramatically better results.
For the purposes of this post, I’ll assume you’re not sending mass email campaigns with lots of spam keywords (Gsuite isn’t a good tool for that, anyways).
First, a bit about spam filters…
Spam filters rely on several factors for deciding which emails go to the inbox, spam folder, or are completely blocked. This includes the sender’s email address, the IP address (this is like a postal address for emails), the content of your message (Viagra, anyone?), and certain authentication protocols for email.
The result of this multi-factor filtering is that even completely legitimate emails may be flagged unintentionally. All you can do is increase your chances by following certain rules and best practices.
So what can you do?
The biggest single thing is to make sure your domain is properly authenticated. This is about as easy as it gets with technology and takes a solid 15 minutes, yet I’m still amazed at how so many of my tech savvy software clients and startup friends don’t even get it right.
In order to properly authenticate your email, you need to add three TXT (text) DNS records to your hosting account (where you setup Gsuite — usually where you bought your domain & host your website).
These are the three protocols:
1. SPF
2. DKIM
3. DMARC
First, go to https://www.mail-tester.com/ and send a test email. This is a cool free service that will point out any obvious issues with your email setup.
Look at the third tab, which will say “You’re fully/not fully authenticated”. This will tell you if any of the three protocols are not setup or setup incorrectly. If they are not setup, this is what you need to do:
- SPF: add a TXT record with this value: v=spf1 include:_spf.google.com ~all
The host record should be “@”
2. DKIM: You’ll need to generate a key from within Gsuite and then add it as a TXT record in your hosting account. Instructions are here
3. DMARC: Add a TXT record with this value: v=DMARC1; p=reject; rua=mailto:info@yourdomain.com
Change the last part after “mailto:” to one of your emails such as postmaster@ or info@.
The host record should be “_dmarc”
NOTE: DMARC only works if you have SPF/DKIM setup correctly first. You may start receiving email reports regarding DMARC. I setup some basic filters in Gsuite that automatically archive these.
With all of these three protocols, it may take a few hours for these changes to be reflected in further test emails.
Blacklists
You might be surprised that in your Mail-Tester results, you see that you’re listed on some blacklists. This is possible even if you’ve never sent a spam email in your life.
There are two parts to blacklists: your IP & your domain
The IP is a string of typically 9 numbers that acts like a postal address for electronic mail.
Gsuite relies on shared IPs for their service (as do many other email providers). With a shared IP, it’s comparable to having an entire office building with dozens or hundreds of tenants occupying individual suites. You have your own private and secured office, but the street address is the same.
Unfortunately, the Spam cops look at your IP first, so if just one other account on the same IP is doing some spammy emailing, that can get the IP on a blacklist and hurt everyone else’s email sending reputation.
To complicate things further, Gsuite rotates IPs, so yours will change from time to time. So you can have a good one for a while, then a bad one, then a good one again.
* “Good/bad” is relative here. Overall Gsuite is pretty good and won’t give completely trashed IPs.
This setup makes it much more likely that any blacklist issues are going to be because of an IP. For the domain itself to be listed on a blacklist, you likely are guilty of doing some spamming or cold-email.
Content of the Message
You’re probably concerned about the score you received on the “SpamAssassin Thinks You can Improve”.
This part evaluates the actual content of your message. For the test, I simply sent an email with “Test” as the subject line and no body, which the content filters look at as a bit unusual and therefore give a bad rating.
If you’re sending simple transactional emails with clients, suppliers, etc. this shouldn’t be much of an issue. Just try to avoid writing emails that make you sound like a Nigerian prince who needs help retrieving his lottery winnings ;)
What else can I do?
As outlined above, the biggest single thing you can do is to make sure that your email is authenticated properly. If it’s not, and you can’t figure out how to update those protocols, go to Fiverr or Upwork and you can find someone to do this pretty cheap. Search “SPF/DKIM setup” and you’ll get plenty of options.
The next level option you have is to look at a third party SMTP and set that up in your Gsuite so that all outbound emails will be sent by it instead. These are services that specialize in email delivery infrastructure (maintaining good IPs, etc.).
I’ve found SendGrid to be pretty good. As of writing they have a shared IP plan that is $14.95 for up to 40k emails/month. This is also a shared IP, but they’re a lot stricter than Gsuite so you should get a better reputation. They also have dedicated IP plans, but these start to get pricey.
Even with these fixes, you still won’t get 100% inboxing, so I have gotten into the habit of always telling new email recipients to “check their spam box as emails sometimes get caught there when sending to a new person”.
Once they mark you as “not spam” you shouldn’t have an issue in the future (with that individual).
If you’re sending small-scale cold emails for sales or business development, don’t do it from your corporate Gsuite account. Even if it’s low volume (ie. 100–1000/daily), just buy another domain and setup Gsuite with that.
Conclusion
Gsuite is a fantastic service with the ease-of-use, countless integrations and very affordable costs. The shared IP system is a downside, but this is super common for all of the big email providers. Getting a dedicated IP will cost a decent chunk more (and come with plenty of headaches).
Whether they know it or not, this is an issue for everyone. It’s the reason why every time you sign up for something online they tell you to check your spam. It’s not your fault and it shouldn’t reflect badly on your business.
Fortunately, there are solutions. With the methods I’ve outlined above, you should see some significant improvements.
