Sending email to many recipients is a common practice of spammers. As a result, most mail providers have strict rules regarding mail content sent to many recipients. It can be difficult to distinguish your email from typical mass marketing, newsletter, and other unsolicited mass email content. To ensure your emails reach their destination, this service and the mail industry recommend some simple guidelines.
The follolwing sections provide our recommended best practices for sending legitimate mail to many recipients through our mail system. Most reputable mail providers give their own recommendations, and we encourage you to read those as well.
Bulk Email
Our mail system is not designed to handle bulk email. To ensure that your emails are sent safely and are not blocked, we recommend that you use a reputable bulk email service to send out your content. Reputable email service providers provide software and services to ensure that your bulk email is delivered in a way that mail providers will accept as good mail.
Examples of reputable email service providers:
- Constant Contact, MailChimp and Marketo for marketing, advertising, or promotional emails
- MailGun and SendGrid for transactional emails
Recipients
Ensure that your recipient lists are current and accurate. Sending emails to a large number of invalid recipients is a clear indicator of spam. Also, mail providers and ISPs can use common invalid addresses as spam traps. Sending mail to these spam traps can result in your domain being blacklisted.
Use confirmed opt-in practices when collecting email addresses for mailing lists. Doing so reduces the chances of your messages being considered unsolicited. Unsolicited email is more likely to be marked as spam by recipients, which leads to the sender being flagged as a spammer by content filters.
If you send email newsletters or communications to your customers, provide them with a way to remove themselves from your mailing list. Typically you can do this by providing an unsubscribe link in the message or with reply-to instructions. This is required by law.
Reputation
Maintain a safe and reputable business website. It should include easy access to any privacy policies and contact information for your business. Spam filter providers often audit high-volume senders by visiting your website, which can be a factor in determining whether you are a spammer.
Ensure that other companies that you allow to include references to your business are reputable. If they send out spam and your company information is referenced in those emails, your domain could be flagged as being related to spam.
Message Content
We recommend that you follow our person-to-person best practices when creating the content for your message.
We strive to maintain the best possible reputation with other mail providers and the email industry. Our Anti-Abuse and Acceptable Use teams work diligently to protect our users from abusive email. An important part of helping us maintain our reputation is helping you send good email.
