Hi,
During my last email campaign, I’ve encountered issues with gmail – and after
investigating this for a few days, I cannot make heads or tails of the results.
Maybe anyone can shed any light on what is happening.
Environment: Mailing list of around 150k subscribers, double opt-in. Using AWS
SES for around 10 years to deliver emails. DKIM, SPF, DMARC and BIMI (with
valid certificate) present. Custom MAIL-FROM domain set up on AWS SES
(newsletter.syniumsoftware.com <http://newsletter.syniumsoftware.com/>),
sending mail address is newslet...@syniumsoftware.com
<mailto:newslet...@syniumsoftware.com>. Sending pattern is irregular, I’m
sending one newsletter every few months.
Timeline:
- A newsletter campaign on January, 18th was successful with high read-rates.
DMARC and BIMI were not present during this campaign, but DKIM and SPF. MAIL
FROM domain was amazonses.com
- Another newsletter campaign was send on March 15th, which was also
successful. DMARC was present, but set to „none" in order receive reports. BIMI
was absent. MAIL FROM domain was amazonses.com <http://amazonses.com/>
- The most recent campaign was send on April 26th with way lower (30-40% lower)
read-rates. DMARC and BIMI were present, DMARC was set to „reject“. MAIL FROM
domain was for the first time newsletter.syniumsoftware.com
<http://newsletter.syniumsoftware.com/>
Findings:
- DMARC reports received indicate that validation was successful most of the
time – the only problems were encountered when mail was forwarded and SPF was
invalid because of the forwards (~1-2% of all mails)
- No unusual bounce or complaint rate through AWS SES notification service
- Read-rates (measured using litmus.com <http://litmus.com/>) and hits on
homepage were 30-40% lower than during past campaigns
- Unsubscribe rates were also 30-40% lower compared to past campaigns
- Our list contains around 40k subscribers using @gmail or @googlemail
addresses – yet we’ve received around 70k entries in the DMARC report from
google.com <http://google.com/>. I know that you might use a different domain
for your gmail address, but a 30k difference seems incredible strange. I’ve
verified that we did not send any duplicate emails using the AWS SES console.
- The google postmaster tools suddenly show a HUGE spike in rejects with the
reason „TempFail – Spam“. Yet, the spam rate shown in the postmaster tools
hover between 0 and 0,1% during this and the last campaigns (i.e. no spike).
Questions:
- Anyone else seeing this behaviour from gmail recently?
- Could the newly created, custom MAIL-FROM-domain cause a behaviour like this?
The MAIL-FROM-Domain has not yet been used before, but the sending email
address was the same
Any insights or hints on how to investigate this would be highly appreciated.
Thanks in advance.
Best,
Mendel
_______________________________________________
mailop mailing list
mailop@mailop.org
https://list.mailop.org/listinfo/mailop
