How to send emails and avoid them being labelled as spam

Bulk Senders Guidelines

Follow the guidelines below to help make sure your bulk mail gets classified correctly and delivered to Gmail recipients.

Note:

How Gmail classifies incoming mail

Spam: Spam goes to the Spam folder; everything else goes to the inbox.

Inbox categories: In Gmail's default inbox layout, messages are divided into the following categories: 

  •  Primary
  • Social
  • Promotions
  • Updates
  • Forums

Mail classifications automatically adjust to match users' preferences and actions. For example, users can unmark spam, move messages to a different category, or switch categories on or off. Over time, Gmail automatically adjusts classifications according to these corrections. Learn more about inbox categories.

Step 1: Use Postmaster Tools

Postmaster Tools provides metrics on reputation, spam rate, feedback loop, and other parameters that can help you identify and fix delivery or spam filter issues.

Step 2: Make sure bulk mail gets classified correctly

  • Send consistently from the same address for each mail category. For example, always send promotional email from one address and financial transactions from another address.
  • Avoid mixing different categories in one message. For example, if you include promotional content in an email with a financial transaction, Gmail could classify the email as promotional.

Step 3: Make sure bulk mail doesn't get marked as spam

Emails without authentication often get rejected or marked as spam to protect recipients from phishing scams. Unauthenticated emails with attachments might get completely rejected for security reasons.

To ensure Gmail can authenticate you:

  • Send from the same IP address
  • Keep valid reverse DNS records your IP address that point to your domain
  • Choose the same address in the 'From:' header for every bulk message

Other recommendations

  • Sign messages with DKIM. We don't authenticate messages signed with keys that use fewer than 1024 bits.
  • Publish a SPF record.
  • Publish a DMARC policy.

Learn more about email authentication.

IP guidelines

  • The sending IP must have a PTR record (i.e. a reverse DNS of the sending IP) and match the IP obtained via the forward DNS resolution of the hostname specified in the PTR record.
  • The sending domain should pass either a SPF check or DKIM check.

Include option to subscribe

Provide each recipient on your distribution list either "opt-in" option below:

  • An email asking them to subscribe
  • A checkbox on a web form or in software they need to manually check

Confirm each recipient's email address is correct before subscribing them.

Avoid:

  • Purchasing an email address from a third-party
  • Including a checkbox on a web form or in software that is automatically checked and subscribes users by default.

Include option to unsubscribe

When users receive a lot of email they don’t open, Gmail will show a card with the option to unsubscribe. 
Allowing users to unsubscribe can improve open rates, click through rates, and spend efficiency. Learn about how users unsubscribe from emails.

A user must be able to unsubscribe from your mailing list through one of the following means:

  1. Make sure recipients can unsubscribe through either:
  • A prominent link in the body of an email leading to a confirmation page, without requiring recipients to provide additional information
  • An option to reply to your email to unsubscribe
  1. To make sure recipients can unsubscribe without leaving Gmail, we strongly recommend adding a 'List-Unsubscribe' header in one of the following ways:
  • Add the following headers for one-click unsubscribe as described in RFC 8058:

     List-Unsubscribe-Post: List-Unsubscribe=One-Click
     List-Unsubscribe: <https://example.com/unsubscribe/opaquepart>

            If the recipient unsubscribes, you'll get this POST request:

     POST /unsubscribe/opaquepart HTTP/1.1
     Host: example.com
     Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
     Content-Length: 26

     List-Unsubscribe=One-Click

  • Point to an email address using 'mailto:' 
     

Note: If both options are added to the List-Unsubscribe header, Gmail will use the method specified first.

Other recommendations

  • Automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple times
  • Occasionally send confirmation messages to users
  • Include each mailing list recipients are signed up for, and give them the option to unsubscribe from any they're no longer interested in

Forwarded mail

To take care of any mail your recipients forward, we recommend that you:

  • Explicitly indicate the email address subscribed to your list
  • Support a URL method of unsubscribing from your mailing list. This is especially helpful if your mailing list manager can't tell who is unsubscribing based on the 'Reply-to:' address.

Format your mail

Make sure your messages have:

  • Formatting according to RFC 5322 and, if using HTML, HTML standards
  • A valid 'Message-ID:' header field
  • An indication that you're sending bulk mail in the 'Precedence: bulk' header field
  • Visible information about the true sender and true landing page for links
  • Subject lines that are relevant to the message content and not misleading
  • Domain formatting according to the highly-restrictive Unicode Security Profile guidelines for international domain names, including:

Authenticating domain
Envelope From domain
Payload domain
Reply-to domain
Sender domain

Follow delivery tips

Important factors for delivery

While Gmail works hard to deliver all legitimate mail, it's possible that some legitimate messages get marked as spam.

Here are factors that normally help deliver messages to Gmail recipients:

  • The 'From:' address matches someone in the recipient's Contacts
  • If your message is welcome but accidentally sent to spam, the recipient can click Not spam

Note: Gmail doesn't accept 'whitelisting' requests from bulk senders, and can't guarantee that all of your messages will bypass our spam filters.

Promotional mail or financial transactions

To help improve the chances of getting important promotional or transactional mail to your recipient, we recommend separating mail by purpose as much as possible. For each type of mail (promotional or transactional), you can:

  • Use separate email addresses
  • Send mail from different domains and/or IP addresses

Monitor third-party senders

If others use your service to send mail (for example: ISPs), you are responsible for monitoring your users and clients' behavior. Make sure you:

  • Provide an email address to your users and/or clients to report abuse (for example, abuse@yourdomain.com)
  • Maintain up-to-date contact information in your WHOIS record and on abuse.net
  • Quickly terminate all users and clients who use your service to send spam

Monitor affiliate marketers

Affiliate marketing programs reward third-parties for bringing visitors to your site. Unfortunately, spammers can take advantage of these programs.

If your brand becomes associated with affiliate marketing spam, it can affect the mail sent by you and your other affiliates. It is your responsibility to monitor your affiliates and remove them if they send spam.

 
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