I’m having serious issues with my email deliverability to Gmail accounts. All my messages keep ending up in the spam folder instead of the inbox.
Here’s what happened:
I started by sending 100 emails and my domain reputation showed as “High” in Gmail Postmaster Tools.
I slowly increased my sending volume: 100, then 200, 500, 1000, 2500, and eventually reached 8345 emails.
When I checked Gmail Postmaster Tools recently, both my domain and IP reputation dropped to “Bad.”
What steps should I take to recover from a poor IP reputation and get back to high reputation status with Gmail? I need my emails to reach the inbox again instead of being marked as spam.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks in advance for your help.
Recovering your IP reputation requires a strategic approach to your email sending practices. I recommend starting with proper authentication by ensuring your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are correctly set up, as Gmail considers these factors seriously. It’s essential to clean your email list by removing non-responsive subscribers or bounced addresses to improve engagement rates. Transitioning to a dedicated IP can also help, as shared IPs can be affected by other senders’ poor practices. Once you have a dedicated IP, begin warming it up by sending emails to your most engaged users first. Monitor your performance metrics closely using Postmaster Tools to ensure you maintain open rates above 20%. Generally, with a dedicated approach and discipline, recovery can take around 4-6 weeks.
I faced similar issues with my email deliverability last year, and it took time to regain a good reputation. The key is to significantly reduce your sending volume initially, as attempting to send a high number of emails can worsen the situation. From my experience, I dropped my daily volume to about 10% of what I was sending when the issues began. Gradually, I increased my volume each week while closely monitoring the Postmaster Tools. It’s crucial to keep your spam rate below 0.1%, and focusing on sending to engaged subscribers first can help rebuild trust with Gmail’s algorithms. I noticed improvements after about 6-8 weeks of this consistent low-volume approach.
you jumped from 1k to 8k emails way too fast - that’s a massive spike and gmail’s algorithms hate that. get a new ip if you can and restart with 50-100 daily sends to your best openers only. also check your content for spam triggers like excessive caps or promotional language.