Resonate Email(s) Going to Spam Folder(s)

During our Community Assembly Meeting on October 9th, @boopboop pointed out that the “Resonate Co-operative: October newsletter” was going into recipients’ spam folders and being “marked as phishing” by Gmail.

This was quickly confirmed by myself and @LLK, and we began brainstorming some ways to fix these issues in the future that I wanted to mention and add to below.

I am not sure if this is the case with other email providers (Yahoo, Outlook, Hotmail, etc.), but I just thought I would throw all of the ideas down below, and we can either sort things out from there, or just keep this post for future reference.

So, the best way to get out of the spam folder in this case would be to have everyone (would someone be able to notify everyone on the forum to check/do this at their convenience?) do the following:

  1. Go into your email inbox to confirm that you received the October newsletter.

  2. If it’s not there, check your spam folder.

  3. If you found it in your spam folder, click on the email, and then click “Report not spam” at the top.

  4. Find the email in your inbox (probably the Promotions tab for Gmail) and then click on the three vertical dots on the top right (next to “archive” “delete” and “Mark unread”) and select “Mark not phishing” (if that is an option)

  5. Once you mark it as “not phishing” you should be able to click on a (colored) link to test if it works. Please also do this, as more clicks will increase engagement which will prevent Gmail from putting Resonate emails in the spam folder in the future.

  6. Finally, if you prefer, click and drag the email from the current tab into the “Primary” tab (Optional). This will just allow you to have a better chance at seeing all of the awesome new updates that Resonate will have in the future!

It looks like Resonate sent the email using MailChimp, so I am not sure why the email got reported as spam, but the more people remove it from spam, mark it as “not phishing,” and engage with the email overall, the more Gmail will recognize Resonate’s address and start accepting mail in people’s inboxes again.

Funny enough, I just started working as an email marketer for an advertising company a few weeks ago, and we are dealing with the exact same issues! So, I can mention more about why this could’ve happened in the first place, and additional ways to try and fix things from the senders’ end, if the @catalog team is interested to hear more, but hopefully the above steps will put things back on course.

Thank you again to @boopboop and @LLK for bringing this up, and for mentioning some of the steps above, and please reach out to me with any questions or concerns that anyone may have.

Thanks,
– Sam

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Since assembly part 2 approaches in a few days, would it make sense to send out an announcement email very soon to only those people who opened the first email @Sam_Martyn?

Aside from increasing attendance, it could start to provide a better track record?

cc: @catalog

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Yea, that sounds like a good idea! I’d be interested to see how many people were actually able to open the email, but a reminder for part 2 of the assembly would be good regardless.

Turns out I’ll need to change our settings for folks in the forum to be able to get the attention of teams by name. Example: “@communications”. Currently disabled. I’d default to allowing everybody to mention our teams and then adjust from there if folks start spamming. But we have a considerate and helpful forum, so for now there’s more to gain than lose I say!

Bringing @sganesh into the convo

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I know we also chatted about this in another topic, but just wanted to touch back here to mention something that came up during my work today.

To prevent emails from going to spam, it can also help to verify your domain name.

Is this something that Resonate has done yet?

Right now, it looks like emails are being sent from members@resonate.is, but with some of the relaunch changes, is this domain still verified?

I don’t know too much here when it comes to the tech-details of domains and how to verify them and all, but I just wanted to share more thoughts here, and maybe @boopboop, @auggod, or other people more knowledgeable with the dev side can help here?