Blog: Observations & Answers

We've posted a few general tips on how to avoid looking like a phisher, but this one is quite specific to senders using a @gmail.com or Google Apps-managed "From: address"in their campaigns. Recently, emails with @gmail.com From: addresses which did not send from a Gmail mail server have been flagged with the following warning in the inbox:

"If you're sending Gmail messages from anywhere other than Gmail itself, they may look like phishing attempts."
-'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail', Lifehacker

Soon after a customer mentioned seeing one of these scary messages, Lifehacker posted an example, explanation and fixes in their post, 'Stop Looking Like a Phisher in Gmail'. While this information is relevant when sending from a regular email client, there's only really one way to avoid these warnings when sending from an email marketing service like Campaign Monitor. That is, use an address other than an @gmail.com address. Or any webmail address, for that matter.

Walk away from webmail addresses

This warning is only one example of how webmail clients are trying to protect their customers from spam and web threats. After all, phishers very commonly use fake From: addresses / spoof mail headers to masquerade as legitimate senders. Gmail has good reason to look dimly upon email that's labelled as coming from them, but isn't being sent from their own servers.

We encourage our customers to avoid using a webmail address as their From: email address. Undoubtedly they will trigger warnings like this and potentially, deliverability issues in the future. Instead, we highly recommend purchasing a domain name from a registrar like Namecheap and setting up a you@yournewdomain.com -style email address. It's still okay to have this domain forward inbound mail to a webmail address, or alternately, you can use Google Apps to send and manage email from this domain directly. Note that Google Apps domains have also been known to throw similar warnings - to avoid this, it's a good idea to setup email authentication, which we'll go through in the next bit.

Don't forget to set up email authentication

Finally, we'd like to remind one and all to authenticate their sending domain in their accounts, especially when using Google Apps to manage their email. In essence:

"All the large ISPs are using email authentication as an important layer in their spam fighting arsenal. By setting up this system as an authenticated sender, you can instantly bypass certain filters, giving your campaigns a better chance of arriving in the destination inbox... Many ISP's like Yahoo! and Hotmail will flag your email as authenticated, which helps to build trust between you and your subscribers and improves the chances of your emails being opened."

It only takes a few minutes for you, or your technical team to setup email authentication, but ensuring that your subscribers and ISP's know that your campaigns are definitely from you is well worth the effort.

Finally, If you have any questions about email authentication, get in touch with our team - we're here to make sure your campaigns not only look good, but make it into as many inboxes as possible, too.

This morning I received one of those daily deals emails from a well-known online travel company. Seeing as I haven't been wearing my traveling pants as of late, I decided I'd unsubscribe from this one, only to trip across the following clause:

Now, for a business that automates a lot of what it does so well, a 5-10 day wait on processing an unsubscribe seems pretty unusual. Does this message mean that I'll be receiving daily emails for 5-10 days to come? Perhaps more importantly, why don't they just use an immediate unsubscribe process like the rest of us?

Now, it's true that the CAN-SPAM Act requires that opt-outs are honored within 10 days. But given that databases can be updated immediately, this sort of move demonstrates a certain one-sidedness to the customer relationship. It's a bit like them saying:

'We'll be awesome to you if you give us your business and your personal details. But ask us to do something that doesn't benefit our bottom line and we'll sit on it for a few days.'

The absolute worst-case of unsubscribe deferral I've seen was from an airline who stated that would take up to 20 days to be removed from their list. Given that they were capable of immediately bombarding customers with confirmation emails and offers on signup, it was a little irksome that they applied such a leisurely attitude to managing unsubscribes. Even if this process involved updating a spreadsheet of email addresses by hand or working with a 3rd-party company to manage their lists, pretty much anyone could agree that they were taking their sweet time to get a fairly simple task done.

So now it's over to you. Why do you think some companies take so long to manage unsubscribe requests? What's the longest delay you've experienced?

As you probably picked up from our recent home screen roundup, we're largely an iPhone shop. However, the time has come for us to update a couple of the HTML email guides and resources on our site, so the team is looking to get an Android handset for testing purposes.

As you can imagine, we've opened up a can of worms here - while we've decided to go with a phone running Froyo (Android OS 2.2, as featured in our design and spam tests), we're absolutely torn on handset we should be using. So, we've decided to open this up to you.

Are you an Android user, or do you optimize your emails for mobile handsets? Let us know the Android phone you think would be most useful for email testing. We've got 3 top-notch Campaign Monitor t-shirts to give away and by voting, you could win one of them.
Sounds good? Then lets get started:

The other week, we held a simple reader poll to determine the maximum width that designers were using for HTML email. After all, its been over 6 years since we issued our original recommendation that emails should be no wider than 550-600px - since then, the average display dimensions have ballooned beyond 1024x768.

Like much of HTML email design, change is slow. Many email client preview panes are still not suitable for emails exceeding 650px wide. Extra-wide emails (say, exceeding 800px), either introduce awkward scroll bars to the preview pane, or are horizontally truncated. Gauging from a purely non-scientific sample - 467 reader votes received - this seems to be common knowledge amongst designers:

"Although the average display is getting bigger, we find that B2B email still requires the 600px limit. It sucks when the whole agency has 1920px wide screens…"
- Stephen Muchmore, Armcom

A whopping 74% of votes were for a maximum email width of 550-650px. 90% of this segment voted explicitly for a width of 600px. In contrast, we received hardly any votes for fluid (100% width) layouts. 20% of respondents said they designed for an email width of 751-850px, with the majority of these responses being explicitly for an 800px maximum. In comparison, most recent fixed-width web designs angle for widths of around 900 - 1000px.

The width limitation is largely set by the small, bottom-right aligned preview panes that feature in desktop clients such as Outlook and Apple Mail. Webmail clients are far more forgiving, with Hotmail and Gmail's preview panes expanding to the width of the email design, although banner advertising tends to take up loads of precious screen real estate.

The practical upside to being limited to a usable width of 550-650px is readability - the wider the email, the more difficult it is to read. Emails become unusable once horizontal scrollbars come into play, so it really does pay to keep your designs thin, trim and terrific.

Thank you to everyone who took part in the poll and a huge congratulations to the winners of our Campaign Monitor schwag. Stay tuned for more giveaways in the coming weeks.

Update: Matt Cutts from Google's Webspam team has confirmed that there is no link between email reputation and penalties in Google search results. Many thanks to Matt for weighing in on this issue.

Yesterday, one of our customers sent us a rather curious post by Lockergnome blogger, Jake Ludington. Titled 'Email Reputation Causes Penalties in Google Search Results', it asserts that recent changes to Google's search algorithm have resulted in possible penalties to sites who also send email newsletters. From Joel:

"Gmail tracks email reputation. It’s part of what gives Gmail some of the best spam filtering on the planet. Gmail looks at how much email your domain sends to @gmail.com addresses and assigns a score to your domain based on how engaged those @gmail.com addresses are with your content... The Gmail scoring system used to apply only to your reputation within Gmail. Google is now applying email behavior to search results. If you don’t keep your email list clean, you get slapped with a penalty..."

The skinny is that if you send to a lot of subscribers who don't regularly open your emails, then, according to Joel, your Google rankings may suffer.

Personally, I haven't seen or heard of any evidence to back up this claim, beyond the anecdotal - as yet, there is no official information from Google linking email reputation to search results. Joel is a customer of another email marketing service (who may take a different approach to managing feedback loops and reputation) and other factors may have resulted in this drop in traffic, so we're definitely not asking you to purge, or segment subscribers from your lists based on advice given in a blog post. However, if he's on the money, this has some pretty strong implications for senders.

We'd like to know if you've had a similar experience to Joel, so:

Do you think sending email newsletters has affected your site's Google page rank recently? Please let us know in the comments below.

Update: Matt Cutts from Google's Webspam team has confirmed that there is no link between email reputation and penalties in Google search results. See comment below and this thread on Hacker News.

Many thanks to @Joel_Hughes on Twitter for keeping us up to speed - we really appreciate the tip. Naturally, we'll be keeping our ear to the ground and will follow up in this blog if any new information comes to light.