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Emails getting blocked? Take this one step to eliminate delivery issues.

Email Deliverability·June 2, 2016·By Ajay Goel·3 min read
Emails getting blocked? Take this one step to eliminate delivery issues.

Overview

SendHustle is a unique service in the email marketing space because it’s built on top of Gmail. That means, unlike a traditional email marketing service like MailChimp, SendHustle doesn’t have any email sending servers or sending IP addresses. All emails are sent from our users’ Gmail accounts and therefore through Gmail’s IP addresses. The benefit of this is that your emails are sent through the world’s highest deliverability servers, since virtually nobody blocks Gmail’s IP addresses.

This, however, doesn’t mean that our users are immune to getting blocked. If the content of your email is deemed spammy, then Gmail itself may block your account, or your recipients’ email servers may block your emails.

SendHustle doesn’t monitor its users

SendHustle intentionally doesn’t monitor its users. Meaning, accounts don’t need to be approved before you can start using SendHustle to send an email marketing campaign. Why don’t we police our users? Because Google does most of the policing for us. If you use SendHustle to send spam, it’s likely that Google’s automated systems will be triggered and your Gmail account will be terminated. It’s unlikely that we’d be able to develop a better algorithm than Google already has in place for detecting and terminating spammers.
However, even Google’s spam detection mechanisms might not be fast enough in some cases. Lots of spammers succeed in using SendHustle to send some spam out before Google notices and terminates the associated Gmail account.

Your emails could be blocked

Because of that, it’s possible for your legitimate emails to become associated with a spammer’s emails and for you to also get blocked. How are your emails connected to the spammer’s emails? If you’re using SendHustle’s open tracking, click tracking, or unsubscribe features, then a “tracking domain” is inserted into your email to allow those features to work. If you’re using open tracking, then an invisible pixel is placed at the bottom of your emails, and the domain referenced is the tracking domain. If you’re click tracking your links, the links are altered so that the SendHustle server is hit first to record the click, and that’s done by way of the tracking domain. Unless you’ve set up your own custom tracking domain, SendHustle uses shared tracking domains across accounts. Typical shared tracking domains look like gmss1.com or gm.ag or gmss1.net. They are variations of the word “gmass” with the vowels removed, using various Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions from .ag to .net to .com.

Some spam filters catalog domains that are commonly found in spammy messages, so if your emails contain the same tracking domain as the spammer’s emails, then your emails can also get blocked.

This screenshot shows an example of the role a tracking domain plays in your SendHustle sent emails. In this case, the tracking domain “gm.ag” is used to track clicks of the reddit link.

The simple one-step solution

 The solution is a simple one. Your accounts should use a tracking domain that is specific to just your email campaigns.

If you are able to add a DNS record for your domain…

You can easily set up a branded tracking domain for your SendHustle accounts that is based on your OWN domain name.

That is the single most important step you can take to maximize your deliverability and avoid blocking issues.

And even better: SendHustle is one of the only email service providers that serves tracking links over HTTPS, rather than the less secure HTTP. That step will help improve your deliverability even more.

Re-sending your campaign to those that blocked you

After a tracking domain has been set on your account, you may want to resend your campaign to anyone that blocked you previously. Here is how to do that.
And of course, you can always use our Spam Solver tool to test your campaign before sending to see exactly where it’s headed. (And if the answer is spam, the tool will help you get to the inbox.)
See why SendHustle has 400k+ users and 9,000+ 5-star reviews


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