Using Amazon SES - Mail Landing In Spam Folder

Hey Mautic Family, how’s it going. Corey B. here,

I need a little help please.

The link is a video I posted in Google Drive, explaining what I set up so far

But in brief, when I send test emails to google, they land in the promotions folder. At first they were landing in the spam folder.

When I sent a test email to my yahoo email, it got sent to spam.

As far as I know right now, I set up everything correctly to verify my domain (shown in video)

I want to make sure before I start my campaigns, that my emails aren’t going to spam.

Thank you in advance.

Hi, this is a really hard question, because you are asking here to give you the holy grail of inboxing.
I would start with this thread:

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Not asking for holy grail, I just want to make sure everything is set correctly on my end, so I know that I atleast did all that I can do to avoid spam folders

If you set up SPF, DKIM, DMARC and you have a clean list, and your domain is not blacklisted, and you send a relevant message, then eventually you’ll inbox.

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ok thanks, from the video i posted, does it look like I have everything set up, as far as the SPF, DKIM, DMARC? i believe i st up everything right. Amazon SES says im verified

maybe this is part of the issue

Can be. Set up dmarc, its good for you.

This is a problem with the spam filter policies of the major providers (gmail, yahoo, outlook). I’m having the same problem. There needs to be some sort of organized protest.

They will permanently (I waited over a month) send all your emails from the shared Amazon SES IP range to spam if 0.3% of people mark it as spam. This is not a reasonable thing to do. People were taught for years to mark emails as spam instead of unsubscribing since unsubscribing can confirm your email to spammers. 1% of people may also simply be dumb, or may be sabotaging your business on purpose. Many people are ignorant or rude or both and use the SPAM button as a convenient way to organize their email.

For years, I’ve been responding to people who applied via a Google form on our website (1.2+ million at this point). When simply sending a first email telling them “you did or did not qualify”, the Amazon SES complaint rate has always averaged between 0.3% and 0.5%, and the Google Postmaster rate always jumps between 0%-2%. There’s nothing that can be done to bring the rates down besides sending people unnecessary emails in order to lower the average. So sending people actual spam is the only way to decrease the spam rate below that extremely low level…

There are times when 50% of my incoming [gmail] emails go to spam. When I contacted Outlook about this their response went to my Outlook junk folder.

I’ve done everything in my power to highlight the option to unsubscribe instead of mark an email as spam, including the ridiculous step of opening the email with “You’re receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don’t want any more” instead of “Hi, here are the details of an important update”.

Yahoo said I should request a better IP pool from Amazon SES. I said:

Amazon SES does not have an option to “request a better IP pool”. Asking them to assign another IP pool to my account doesn’t seem like a valid solution anyway. There’s no reason to believe that their other IP pools aren’t experiencing the same problem, or will experience the same problem at any given point. I’m very surprised that your system is this unsophisticated. I should be able to use Amazon SES without all my emails going to spam.

I searched Hacker News and found loads of other people with the same problem. People need to protest this terrible policy.

I think Amazon SES quality is really good, and what matters is the relationship with your contacts.

You need to see who opens, and clicks you emails, and keep using them in a strategic way.

Often senders won’t delete people who never open an email, hoping, that until they complain, it’s a good address, maybe they will buy something later on.

That is not the case.

The spam designation doesn’t only come from people pushing the ‘spam’ button. Sometimes your email doesn’t even reach the mailbox. The feedback loop will capture this as:

image

These are 5xx errors, but classified as Transient by SES, which means Mautic will try again.

So you might send emails that never get delivered, but affect your relationship with the recipient domain.

Delete the never openers, keep a targeted tidy list, and you’ll inbox.
Personalize, analyse, iterate, check the feedback loop, make them click, reply, show activity, and you will inbox.

Maybe I should share a bigger screenshot.

Open tracking isn’t accurate. If the recipient doesn’t load images they’ll never register as an open. I don’t load images by default.

Also, if they’re missing the emails in their spam folder they won’t be opened either.

SES, gmail, yahoo, and outlook all share the blame, but most of the blame is on gmail, yahoo, and outlook.

Ofc it’s not accurate. Some opens are not tracked, some openen are false positives.

So track clicks and other interactions.

It’s an even level playfield, it sucks for everyone.