We have a 99% email reputation, but Gmail disagrees

We have a 99% email reputation. Gmail disagrees.

Oooooh boy. Let’s get this out of the way first. Email sucks.

Now to the how and the why. We’re builders. We love making tools to help designers and developers live a little bit easier. We’re pretty good at it. Marketing, though? We do our best, but the truth is, we don’t like to bother people.

Like a lot of small software companies, we use SendGrid to deliver our emails. We try our best to follow email best practices. We even have a 99% reputation score in SendGrid. Gold star. A+ student.

Gmail, however, did not get the memo.

Right before we hit send on our announcement emails for our new Build Awesome Kickstarter campaign, we took a deeper look at some of our recent email sends. Things had gone quiet. Not bouncing. Not throwing errors. Just… disappearing into Gmail’s spam folder like a ‘possum slipping into a vent.

In our recent crash course, here’s what we’ve learned about Gmail deliverability: it runs its own reputation system that has absolutely nothing to do with anyone else’s opinion of you. If you don’t do certain things “correctly” (meaning Gmail’s own definition), you get marked as spam.

Now, there are definitely folks who will choose to mark some of what we send as spam. And for them, rightly so. We get that. But this is not that. We’ve entered a black hole for Gmail deliverability. And since 90% (literally) of our email list goes to Gmail addresses… the results aren’t pretty. It looks like this has been happening to us for a while. We’re a small company of just over 20 people, and can’t watch everything all the time. We’d rather be making you new icons. So some of you may have missed things we were genuinely excited to share. That’s a big bummer.

(And yes… there are companies out there that can likely help us with that. Most tend to be out of our price range. So we’ve been doing a lot of this on our own.)

But here’s the part that really gets us. At our CORE, our instinct is to only email folks when we actually have something fun to share. A big release, something we’re excited about, news worth your time. That’d probably be every couple of months, if that. Respectful. Low noise. How we want to be treated. Like, genuinely, if we could, we would only very occasionally send a big email blast to our customers.

Turns out, the email gods hate that. To keep a sending IP “warm” and maintain deliverability, you’re expected to send constantly. Like… all the time. Which means the system actively punishes companies for respecting their customers’ inboxes. It’s a genuine catch-22: send too many emails and your reputation drops from complaints. Send too few and it drops from inactivity. Try to do the right thing and you get penalized either way. And. It. Is. Frustrating.

We’re working to fix our issues by culling old addresses, slowing our sends down, and making sure all of our i’s are dotted and t’s are crossed. It’s not a fast fix.

So if you haven’t heard from us recently… or if you’ve heard TOO MUCH from us recently, that’s why. We’re working on it. And we’ve got a lot of good stuff to catch you up on. In the meantime, please help spread the word about Build Awesome. It’s a genuinely cool product, and we hope you’ll like it. At the very least, watch the video.

P.S. If you suspect you might’ve missed some emails from us, mind doing a quick favor? In your email client, search for from:[email protected] in:spam and click the little “Report Not Spam” button. You’re awesome.