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Comment by lxchase | Hacker News Reader

Would love to get feedback from the HN community. We're a decently sized sender following what we think are best practices (sending to engaged, dkim, etc.) however our gmail deliverability is rock bottom and it's been difficult to improve. Every other provider is to benchmark or better. One issue may be high hard bounce rates on our very first email sent, but we don't send emails to bounces at all afterwards. (Wouldn't a double opt-in result in the same situation). What are the most impactful levers to pull in your opinion?

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> ...our gmail deliverability is rock bottom and it's been difficult to improve. Every other provider is to benchmark or better. ... What are the most impactful levers to pull in your opinion?

I'll be blunt, and maybe others will disagree with me, and say that I don't think there are any impactful levers you can pull.

In my experience, Gmail frankly does not give a shit about receiving e-mail from any senders except ones that fall in one of two categories: a) very large so users will complain in large groups if receiving from them is impacted (put your Outlooks and your Yahoos and your huge residential ISPs in this category) or b) technically-savvy senders that aren't quite as large but Gmail employees routinely interact with so they're otherwise "trustworthy" (Fastmail is an example here).

I've ranted about here but I've had terrible success being smaller than a multinational ISP and sending e-mail to Gmail users. Messages will silently disappear, even though Gmail's SMTP server claims to accept the message, and the postmaster tools are less-than-useful (that might be my one suggestion, sign up for them on behalf of your domain and see if you get any reports; I didn't, 'too small'), and no amount of tinkering or asking would help.

I admit I'm just a SMB org whose business isn't sending e-mail--it's "just" a communications tool for us--so I had this option: I threw in the towel and switched to Fastmail and have had no problems since.

> That might be my one suggestion, sign up for them on behalf of your domain and see if you get any reports; I didn't, 'too small.

I had the same issue, what I found though is that DMARC reports give at least some insight into the process, but that's about all the information I've managed to get from Google.

Gmail is all about user engagement. If you are sending mail that users are not reading or are reacting negatively to, you will eventually be blocked. Have you used the posmaster tools they make available for delivery insight?

> One issue may be high hard bounce rates on our very first email sent, but we don't send emails to bounces at all afterwards.

This is a big red flag, though. Are you saying it just happened one single time? In that case, change your IP and start over.

Or are you saying that you regularly trigger a lot of hard bounces? Because if that is the case, that might explain it all right there. High rates of hard bounces are taken as evidence of spam or other nefarious activities, since the typical reasons for high hard bounces are a) a really old list (implies it has been transacted somehow, therefore not opt-in), or b) enumeration attempts.

or people putting random emails to get to the next screen/download link

Make sure SPF, DKIM, and From domains are all at the same root/parent domain. AKA "alignment" in DMARC - this can help even without a full DMARC record.

Tighten your engagement segmentation for Gmail. Repeat every 2 weeks if you don't see improvement. If you get down to 30 day actives with no improvement, the problem is almost certainly elsewhere. Occasionally it can be related to external factors - 3rd party email traffic which might use your domain, say if you buy advertising in other newsletters, bad SEO practices (think 'blackhat' rather than 'mediocre'), or poor customer experience with your business/website.

Hard bounce rates on your initial email are always a little elevated vs known recipients, but if you're above 2-3% that's too high and you should work to fix problems with the signup process.

a) SPF correct?

b) DKIM correct and signing properly?

c) rDNS is right?

c) the IP block your smtpd is in isn't in any RBLs?

d) You're not sending commercial bulk email?

e) Your mail server identifies itself properly to the other smtpd?

f) Your mail server properly implements TLS1.2 opportunistically?

I run my own mail server and have zero delivery issues to gmail. But I do not run marketing mailing lists, nor bulk communications of the same mail content to many customers, it sounds like you're mass-sending mail.

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