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Email Deliverability


Dan Cole

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Here is what I think is a good read, or video you can listen to, on how to ensure that your emails don't end up in your customers junk or spam folder.

7 Key Strategies for Avoiding the Gmail Spam Filter

Dan

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  • 1 month later...

Thanks @Dan Cole  How is it? I pay for addwords and google junked my emails. WTF?

I have to say that gmail is an unwanted service for me and I am not teached as well as I hoped. I have no imagination how to solve gmail paradoxon with non-registered or junked customers. I have missed shipping and returns only from gmail.com shoppers.
One reason which I missed from this read that androids and "free" gmail services attracts digital idiots to use gmail on phones. Where no chance just only problem and costs of me.

I wish a contract with the google that if one of my customer use gmail.com than google ensure that it wont be a loss of me. I hope one day google will be punished by this way in legal procedure and pay me thousand of money which I payed to google for tones of addwords!
 

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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Hi Gergely.....as far as I know I haven't had any issues like that recently.   You might recall however that at one point I wasn't receiving emails since the "Reply To:" address wasn't getting added to osC emails. Google is gong to great lengths to reduce spam and that is one of the tests they use.   After I added the "Reply to:" address I started receiving all emails that were being sent from our shop but more recently I noticed them being flagged with the dreaded GMAIL "?" Warning Flag.  I think they are trying to tell me that it's time to get a DKIM Record which should eliminate that.   Have you set up a DKIM record?    That might solve your problem assuming that the emails that you're are referring to are generated from your site.

Dan

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I dont belive this is configuration problem of me. I dont use telephone contact with customers only email chanel used. 1 registration and 3 order email are sent.
I have discovered gmail paradoxon when analised the past year unsuccessfully shipped order package returns. All non-delivered returns were gmail.com email customers. They ordered something but never pick up. It means for me that something could be wrong around gmail. Gmail customers are exist over 50% in my business but all unsuccessfull delivered package (1%) referal only to gmail. How is it that gmail users are only ones whos dont want to pick up ordered products?

The article adviced something:

Quote

So use them to tell your subscribers to watch for upcoming emails and to check their spam folders if they don’t receive them.

My customers are not subscribers but somehow some orders email put in junk folder. This is my assumption but never proven. If it could be true then google AI is a shit and If I pay for google to get customers than I want that google never put my emails into junk folders!

But there could be another corelation between gmail and bad customers which is not to be relevated.

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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Quote

All non-delivered returns were gmail.com email customers.

Any hints as to why they are being returned?  Are you able to call a few of those customers and see what they have to say.   I generally don't hesitate to pick up the phone whenever I see something that is odd....customers like the proactive approach and I tend to learn something each and every time. 

You didn't say but have you set up a DKIM record?  Google seems to lead the pack when setting standards so it might be as simple as that.  At this point I'm just seeing the warning flag but perhaps if there are other issues and there is no DKIM record, Google might well just toss it back.   Whatever it is, it might become a greater issue as other email providers follow Googles lead.

Dan

 

 

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Another option could be to outsource your emails to a co. who do this as a service.  

Mandrill
Sendgrid

There might be more.  

I have been finding more and more (real) emails going into my Spam folder recently :(

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@Dan Cole im not sure if this is the exact purpose of your post, however, have you ever check to make sure your Server IP/s haven't been blacklisted?

There are several free services that will monitor against all popular blacklists - and it only takes 1 listing to get you kicked into most spam filters. 

I use mxtoolbox  

On one of my old hosts the ip's they assigned (which had been recycled) ... the previous owner had been black listed like crazy - I inherited those black listings with the ip's. 

This becomes an even bigger issue with shared hosting.... where many are sharing the IP's and one person/site can land a bunch in trouble. 

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Good point Gary.....I get copies of some of the marketing emails that we generate ie mail from my server.   They were ending up in my spam folder and I wondered why....I played around with them a bit and discovered that if I mark them not spam that would stop that from happening for a little while but later they would end up in my spam folder again.   The next thing I did was to mark them not spam and them opened them in my IN Box as they were received.  I would open them and then delete them....that kept them out of my spam for an even longer period but they would eventually return to spam.  Next I marked them not spam again, open them in my inbox and left them for a bit before deleting them.  That seems to prevent them from ending up in spam but who knows they may yet end up there again one of these days.  I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that gmail at least, determines how you deal with emails in deciding if they are spam on not.  At least it seems to be one of the factors they use.

Dan

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12 minutes ago, greasemonkey said:

@Dan Cole im not sure if this is the exact purpose of your post, however, have you ever check to make sure your Server IP/s haven't been blacklisted?

Good point Scott.  I do check that from time to time and come up clean.  Looking at the article I posted you'll see that email hosts use lots of factors in determining what is and what isn't spam these days. Our job is to make sure we pass as many of those tests as possible to ensure that our emails are being delivered.

Dan

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19 hours ago, Dan Cole said:

Any hints as to why they are being returned?  Are you able to call a few of those customers and see what they have to say.   I generally don't hesitate to pick up the phone whenever I see something that is odd....customers like the proactive approach and I tend to learn something each and every time. 

You didn't say but have you set up a DKIM record?  Google seems to lead the pack when setting standards so it might be as simple as that.  At this point I'm just seeing the warning flag but perhaps if there are other issues and there is no DKIM record, Google might well just toss it back.   Whatever it is, it might become a greater issue as other email providers follow Googles lead.

Dan

 

 

SPF used and gmail pass it.
 

Quote

spf=pass (google.com: domain of [email protected] designates 11.XX.XXX.XX as permitted sender) [email protected]

https://support.google.com/mail/answer/180707?co=GENIE.Platform%3DDesktop&hl=en&oco=0

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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For my new site I'll be using Mandrill exclusively for all store emails. It costs, but deliverability won't be an issue and I'll be able to granularise offers, newsletters, review requests and order confirmation emails a lot better. 

osCommerce user since 2003! :thumbsup:

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1 hour ago, frankl said:

For my new site I'll be using Mandrill exclusively for all store emails. It costs, but deliverability won't be an issue and I'll be able to granularise offers, newsletters, review requests and order confirmation emails a lot better. 

I believe Gary had been working on a Mailchimp/Mandrill commercial addon.... @burt I remember testing it when you where working on it... did you finish it?

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3 hours ago, frankl said:

For my new site I'll be using Mandrill exclusively for all store emails. It costs, but deliverability won't be an issue and I'll be able to granularise offers, newsletters, review requests and order confirmation emails a lot better. 

@frankl Frank, I wonder if this is really true? ie  deliverability won't be an issue.  I'm sure that the deliverable rate will be higher but won't email hosts like gmail still analyze those other soft issues (were similar emails deleted without being read, were others marked as spam, were others opened and quickly deleted or whatever other criteria they use to judge whether something is spam) to what you and other users of their service have previously judged by their actions to be spam.  I would be surprised if they received a free pass on those factors but maybe they do.   Does anyone know?

I'm sure the delivery service will help to tip the scale in your favor but I would think that you still want to encourage customers to add you to their white lists/address books etc.

Dan

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9 hours ago, Gergely said:

@Gergely Gergely if you are able to add a DMIK record it would be very interesting to see if it helps.   Is your email host able to tell you why the messages are being returned...assuming they are.  My host was able to do that when I ran into the "Reply to:" issue....you did fix that right?

Dan

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5 hours ago, greasemonkey said:

I believe Gary had been working on a Mailchimp/Mandrill commercial addon.... @burt I remember testing it when you where working on it... did you finish it?

I use a Mandrill add-on Gary made which works very well. All store emails are sent through Mandrill review requests etc.  I now wouldn't be without it. 

 

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@Dan Cole


We are talking not the same sorry me its my fail. There are no mailer deamons. I have shipped package returns. Only orders shipping could be failed where gmail used. Reply To and anything else is well configured. There are never found "Mail delivery failed: returning message to sender" emails.
In hungary the most popular shipping method "pay on delivery" when customer be able to reject the shipping. In this case the package come back to me and I have to pay for shipping company when customers never pay.
The question is why happening this. I see that this happening only when gmail.com used. This is the gmail paradoxon for me.

I give a real example when deamons returned:
some idiots give [email protected] opossite the real own email address [email protected]. In this case I have found correct email deamon returns from gmail to my reply address.

Quote

SMTP error from remote mail server after RCPT TO:<[email protected]>:
host mail.gmail.hu [94.199.52.210]: 550 5.1.1 <something@gmail.hu>:
Recipient address rejected: User unknown


I am talking about why only gmail.com has a trouble when everything is good. Could be the order emails junked? No returns no informations. Only wrong shipping.

Prevoius post you mentioned how difficult to make a correction with spammed emails. Why force gmail the users to do something which is unpossible?

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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Thanks @Gergely . Now I understand.   I guess I would be inclined to pick up the phone and figure out what the underlying issue is.  It seems odd has that users of gmail account for a much higher failure rate. 

It is interesting that the norm is COD (Cash On Delivery) where you are.  We used to deliver COD years ago but got away from it for the exact reason you're struggling with.  Now orders are paid for up front or they don't ship.  I suspect that is where you'll end up sooner or later.

Dan

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8 hours ago, douglaswalker said:

I use a Mandrill add-on Gary made which works very well. All store emails are sent through Mandrill review requests etc.  I now wouldn't be without it.

Doug what exactly do you like about Mandrill? Why wouldn't you be without it?

Dan

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I had many problems with email delivery, spam boxes, blacklisted (shared hosting). All the things people above are talking about. Swapping to Mandrill made them go away. 

The other issue was what my server could deal with eg  emails per hour etc. If I needed to send out review requests I would have to make sure they didn't go out in a big block... just lots of little issues that I now don't have to worry about.

Also I can see if an email has been delivered and if not resend etc. Mandrill is just the one i went for there are others.

 

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On 8/23/2017 at 11:59 PM, greasemonkey said:

I remember testing it when you where working on it... did you finish it?

I had Mandrill working on one of my test installations, and it got finished to the point of being "usable".

I had plans for a slick admin interface (eg ability to do everything from with osc admin and never have to login to Mandrill), but that never happened as the shopowner for whom it was written did not want that level of "slick".

So far as I recall...Mandrill gives 2000 emails for free (for implementing and testing).  That might well have changed since I last looked though.  If you do decide to try it, get it set up (it takes some effort/testing, eg setting up SPF DKIM etc) - there is a testing system at Mandrill somewhere which tells you when your domain is correctly usable for Mandrill purposes.  At that point, when ready...hit me up and I'll dig out the code changes for you.

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I am working on a mail tracking pixel with hooks and a mail app class so this will be lighter in the future. The new app will show opened mail stats and could give me more chance with deeper analysations in customer's behaviours. Lets see the truth.

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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40 minutes ago, Gergely said:

I am working on a mail tracking pixel with hooks and a mail app class so this will be lighter in the future. The new app will show opened mail stats and could give me more chance with deeper analysations in customer's behaviours. Lets see the truth.

Nice...this is a much needed tool.   I'm also doing some work on this and will post back here as I accomplish stuff.

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@Dan Cole

The first quick experiencies shows me that email pixel wont be the only one thing that we should use. After one week some customers opened some never touched pixel (could be false positive if image loading disabled), so this measure option wont be 100%. "Click here to see another info" links could be better next part of measurement from emails text.
The account pages could be more important than we thought so I have to link them in emails with touch parameters to identify users. HTML landing pages should be the next part of the measures. And I am thinking about download product User Manual link measurements.
Emails need more user interaction. Your posted link describes very well the steps.

This feature is very far at  this moment from oscommerce email system..

:blink:
osCommerce based shop owner with minimal design and focused on background works. When the less is more.
Email managment with tracking pixel, package managment for shipping, stock management, warehouse managment with bar code reader, parcel shops management on 3000 pickup points without local store.

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  • 3 months later...
On 9/6/2017 at 3:06 PM, tgely said:

@Dan Cole

The first quick experiencies shows me that email pixel wont be the only one thing that we should use. After one week some customers opened some never touched pixel (could be false positive if image loading disabled), so this measure option wont be 100%. "Click here to see another info" links could be better next part of measurement from emails text.
The account pages could be more important than we thought so I have to link them in emails with touch parameters to identify users. HTML landing pages should be the next part of the measures. And I am thinking about download product User Manual link measurements.
Emails need more user interaction. Your posted link describes very well the steps.

This feature is very far at  this moment from oscommerce email system..

@tgely Gergely did you ever get this to a point where it is usable or could use some testing? :smile:  I'm starting to send out promotional emails using your HTML Email work and would love to see what the open/click rates are etc.

Dan

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