Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buro9 | Hacker News Reader

Will the issue of arriving in the Promotions and Updates tab affect transactional emails sent through MailChimp (and comparable competitors)?

For example, if I'm sending a "Here's your password reset email" via MailChimp, will I now have to worry about it not just potentially going into spam, but also under some tab that the user may not look.

I'm only really concerned about the transactional email, whilst we send list mail too I think it's reasonable that is classified however the user and the user client deems fit (if they wish to receive that at all). But when it comes to an email that the user has explicitly requested and expects immediately, not having it go straight to their visible and main inbox is an issue.

Thus far we have seen our transactional emails also going to Promotions, as well as our standard marketing emails.

This could be both good and bad. Bad because as you mention, the user won't see it immediately even if they requested it. Good because if the user actually uses and likes your service, they may start to take those transactional emails to their Priority inbox which could train it to also respect the marketing type e-mails as Priority as well. Again, this would only happen if the user actually likes your service.

Hmm.

I hope Gmail figure this one out... the transactional emails should always hit the inbox. I think most users would be fine if the marketing emails hit the promotions tab.

I'm not sure it should be all or nothing... but I know that every user would agree that the transactional emails that they explicitly want should hit their inbox.

I'm using Mandrill to send out my transactional email. I'm hoping this change doesn't force me to get back into the mail server business - that is something I gladly pay to outsource.

Exactly my concern.

Transactional email deliverability is more important than marketing emails to me. If needs must, I'll host my own again... but I really like not managing email servers and fighting blacklists.

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