This page has tips to help improve your email deliverability when sending to personal Gmail accounts.
When you send commercial or bulk email, it’s important to follow the Email sender guidelines and applicable regulations and to respect recipients’ inboxes. To manage an effective email campaign, your messages should connect you and your recipients in a meaningful way. Follow the tips on this page to improve your email delivery and effectiveness.
- Authenticate your outgoing email
- Whether you send large or small volumes of email, it is important to establish a trusted online identity. Strong authentication lets email platforms identify you, and protects your domain or organization from being spoofed by other senders. Authentication helps email recipients trust that messages actually come from you.
- Set up email authentication for all of your sending domains at your domain provider. We recommend following your domain provider’s instructions, and Google's instructions for setting up SPF and DKIM authentication.
- Once you’ve verified that your legitimate messages are being authenticated with SPF and DKIM, add a DMARC policy to prevent other senders from impersonating your domain or organization. Go to detailed steps for setting up DMARC.
- Respect user choice
- Make sure you're sending messages at a reasonable volume, expected by your recipients, and that your messages have content that recipients are interested in. Users have several ways to indicate which messages they’re not interested in, for example, marking messages as spam. To help prevent high spam rates, we recommend implementing one-click unsubscribe as described in our Email sender guidelines, and honoring users’ unsubscribes.
- Make sure recipients explicitly opt into getting messages from the address you use to send email. This is particularly important if the recipient has never received email from you or has never opted into getting messages from you.
- Use Postmaster Tools
- To measure and monitor your email deliverability to Gmail users, use Postmaster Tools. Postmaster Tools have dashboards with detailed information about your configuration, spam rates, message authentication rates, and delivery errors.
- If your email traffic volume to personal Gmail accounts is too low, Postmaster Tools dashboards might not include data for your sending domain. This is to protect the privacy of Gmail users. You might need to send enough email volume to generate Postmaster Tools dashboards data and before a request through the Sender Contact Form can be analyzed.
- Monitor spam rates
- Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.1%. Maintaining a high spam rate can result in increased spam classification for your messages. Regularly monitor your sending domain's spam rate in the Postmaster Tools Spam rate and Feedback loop dashboards.
- Important: After your spam rates in Postmaster Tools improve, it can take some time for Gmail to adjust its spam classification rate for your messages
- Ramp up slowly
- Increasing your sending volume too quickly can result in delivery issues. Increase your sending volume gradually and use Postmaster Tools to monitor email delivery.
- If messages are bounced, deferred, or not authorized, reduce your sending volume until the SMTP error rates drop. Then slowly increase your sending volume.
- Maintain consistent sending volumes
- Pace your email traffic to send at consistent volumes throughout the day and over several days to avoid random spikes in email sending volume. Consistent sending volume is critical for your sending domain’s long-term email delivery success. A consistent sending volume is particularly important for new domains as they establish their sending reputation.
- Avoid misleading display names and subject lines
- Don't use emojis or other non-standard characters to imitate graphic elements in messages. For example, don’t use emojis or images to imply the sender has been verified in some way.
- Don’t use misleading content in message headers. For example, don’t include Re: or Fwd: in the subject header for messages that aren’t actual replies or forwards, and don’t use display names to imply a threaded conversation with the recipient.
- Limit sharing of IP Addresses and Domains
- Using the same IP address or domains for multiple senders can result in a low domain or IP address reputation, or poor deliverability for all senders using the domain or IP address. Regularly monitor domain and IP address reputation in the Postmaster Tools Spam rate and Feedback loop dashboards.
- Don’t spoof
- Don't impersonate other domains or senders. This practice is called spoofing, and Gmail might mark these messages as spam or phishing.
- Go to the source
- Google posts and maintains its requirements and best practices right here in the help center. While there are useful resources online, visit our help center for the latest requirements, best practices, and error codes.
