Is there no way to protest the email spam filter rules of Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook?

[MaximilianKohlr]

SPF, DKIM, & DMARC are all fine. I'm using Amazon SES. Their spam filters are awful and are harming what I feel is a very important project.

They're permanently (I waited over a month) sending all emails from a shared Amazon SES IP range to spam because 0.3% of users who received an email from that IP marked it as spam instead of unsubscribing... I can't believe they think that is a reasonable thing to do... People were taught for years to mark emails as spam instead of unsubscribing since unsubscribing can confirm your email to spammers. 1% of people may also simply be dumb, or may be sabotaging your business on purpose. Making such a drastic decision based on less than half of 1% of email recipients seems ridiculous.

They're allowing the 1% lowest common denominator to determine what the other 99% are allowed to see.

"60% of the population have an IQ under 85; this is not a small issue." - Richard Haier https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/39/IQ_distribution.svg/1024px-IQ_distribution.svg.png

"Too many people are ignorant or rude or both and use the SPAM button as a convenient way to organize their email" https://support.google.com/mail/thread/6901723/

I've done everything in my power to highlight the option to unsubscribe instead of mark an email as spam, including the ridiculous step of opening the email with "You're receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don't want any more" instead of "Hi, here are the details of an important update".

For years, I've been responding to people who applied via a google form on our website (1.2+ million at this point). When simply sending a first email telling them "you did or did not qualify", the Amazon SES complaint rate has always averaged between 0.3% and 0.5%, and the Google Postmaster rate always jumps between 0%-2%. There's nothing that can be done to bring the rates down besides sending people unnecessary emails in order to lower the average. So sending people actual spam is the only way to decrease the spam rate below that extremely low level...

There are times when 50% of my *incoming* [gmail] emails go to spam. When I contacted Outlook about this their response went to my Outlook junk folder.

Their spam filters are horrible and they don't seem to care at all. And it's causing major problems with a majority of people missing important emails. Eg: https://arstechnica.com/cars/2024/02/a-spam-folder-may-have-foiled-andretti-cadillacs-f1-entry/

Yahoo said I should request a better IP pool from Amazon SES. I said:

Amazon SES does not have an option to "request a better IP pool". Asking them to assign another IP pool to my account doesn't seem like a valid solution anyway. There's no reason to believe that their other IP pools aren't experiencing the same problem, or will experience the same problem at any given point. I'm very surprised that your system is this unsophisticated. I should be able to use Amazon SES without all my emails going to spam.

I searched Hacker News and found loads of other people with the same problem https://hn.algolia.com/?q=email+spam

I found a way to submit bulk mail appeals to Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc. (https://www.emailtooltester.com/en/blog/why-are-my-emails-going-to-spam/). I think my appeal to Gmail worked (had to wait a few weeks), but Outlook and Yahoo basically just told me "Too bad, your IP pool is bad".

[ygjb]

> Their spam filters are awful and are harming what I feel is a very important project.

Cried every marketer in history when individuals, groups, or governments implemented rules to make it hard to reach people.

> They're allowing the 1% lowest common denominator to determine what the other 99% are allowed to see.

Conversely, think of it from the perspective that those 1% of users are fed up with receiving marketing emails, and the result is that they are taking the measure they feel is effective to reduce the amount of spam they receive.

> "60% of the population have an IQ under 85; this is not a small issue." > For $25/mo, which is a 50% increase in my monthly SES cost. (pulled from your reply)

Look in the mirror. If you are attacking the intelligence of your users because they are doing the best they can with the limited tools that advertising driven companies use to manage their email, it may be worth taking some time to reflect on why that is. You want to send marketing email; you opted to use a cheaper service that has documented considerations for reputation impact. You know the correct solution, you just think you are entitled to a lower cost service to get your product in front of other people. You aren't, and it isn't the users who are the problem, it's the ecosystem.

[MaximilianKohlr]

>Conversely, think of it from the perspective that those 1% of users are fed up with receiving marketing emails

You may have missed the part where I described how I open emails with "You're receiving this email because of xyz. Please blocklist your email if you don't want any more". The link to unsubscribe/blocklist is at the top of the email. They are simply abusing the "report spam" button. They applied for something, or someone used their email to apply. Getting a response to that application is not spam.

>If you are attacking the intelligence of your users

I'm listing supporting facts for why it's insane to let less than 1% of the population to dictate something for everyone else.

> You want to send marketing email

Email. Not marketing email.

>you opted to use a cheaper service that has documented considerations for reputation impact. You know the correct solution, you just think you are entitled to a lower cost service

This is incorrect. I addressed it in a previous comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41708652

[ygjb]

I didn't miss that part. I am telling you that users hitting report spam on emails (yours, or others) that they don't want to see are not abusing the button. They are sending a signal that they don't want to see (or receive) those emails anymore. They are using the user interface of their client to control their user experience because they have decided that your workflow (or others workflows) to stop receiving the messages is more annoying than hitting that button. It's not a user problem, it's an ecosystem problem, and developers and product owners like you are continuing to drive the problem by insisting that "No, it's the users who are wrong!".

> I'm listing supporting facts for why it's insane to let less than 1% of the population to dictate something for everyone else.

I would argue that there are less than 0.01% of email users in general that own or manage private or commercial distribution lists. Expecting that owners of those lists can dictate to users how the owners can access users limited attention is even more ridiculous.

Either way, you are still attacking or insulting not only your users, but also all of the people who may have or will receive unsolicited email address from a service adjacent (in a shared cloud service sense) to yours.

> Email. Not marketing email.

It appears you believe that there is a distinction. It is still a marketing email because you are using email to drive engagement or deliver service. Marketing isn't limited to a direct offer of a product or service, especially if you depend on those emails from growth or retention.

[MaximilianKohlr]

>developers and product owners like you are continuing to drive the problem by insisting that "No, it's the users who are wrong!".

This makes no sense. I'm the problem for responding to people who signed up for something?

>I am telling you that users hitting report spam on emails (yours, or others) that they don't want to see are not abusing the button. They are sending a signal that they don't want to see (or receive) those emails anymore. They are using the user interface of their client to control their user experience because they have decided that your workflow (or others workflows) to stop receiving the messages is more annoying than hitting that button. It's not a user problem, it's an ecosystem problem

The email providers need to account for that and not send emails to spam because less than half of 1% of users mark them as spam. Email providers are already taking steps (unsubscribe header) to make things easier. And as I saId, I've done everything in my power to do so as well.

>you are still attacking or insulting not only your users, but also all of the people who may have or will receive unsolicited email address from a service adjacent (in a shared cloud service sense) to yours.

I don't see how.

This doesn't appear to be useful to continue if you're insisting there are no differences between types of emails.

[MaximilianKohlr]

I saw another HN user saying Outlook will happily whitelist you (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23331455), but I contacted them and they did not give me such an option.

[dtgm92]

If anyone sends me an email, and it's from a company I have no business or account with, they get marked as spam. That is the digital equivalent of walking up to someone's door and annoying me. The fact it's allowed for IRL homes and for physical mail boggles my mjnd.

[MaximilianKohlr]

That seems off-topic. I'm not cold-emailing people. They applied on our website.

[mattl]

When they do that do you send them an email to opt-in?

[MaximilianKohlr]

I have not found a way to do that with Google Forms, so the first email I send them is telling them whether or not they passed. That email has an unsubscribe link.

[mattl]

You can require that the form requires a Google Account.

[kjs3]

All that typing, including "users are stupid" (classy af there), apparently months or years of struggle, tons of examples of others failing in the same way, and not a single thought "maybe I shouldn't be doing it this way".

[MaximilianKohlr]

Feel free to give suggestions for other ways I should/could be doing it.

[mattl]

Doesn't SES let you have a dedicated IP address?

[MaximilianKohlr]

For $25/mo, which is a 50% increase in my monthly SES cost. And based on my experience with contacting Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo, etc., there is no way to get my dedicated IP whitelisted or removed from a blacklist once it's on one.

And given that the normal SES complaint rate is 0.3-0.5%, and 0-2% for google postmaster when simply responding to people who applied with a "you did/didn't qualify", my dedicated IP is very likely to get blacklisted.

Also, the whole point of using SES is for them to handle the blacklist stuff. It's much cheaper to set up your own SMTP server, but deliverability is supposed to be better and easier with Amazon SES.

[tssva]

> Also, the whole point of using SES is for them to handle the blacklist stuff.

Since Amazon themselves in their documentation describe using a dedicated IP address as the way to avoid the reputational impact of other Amazon SES customers you and your service provider seem to have a very different view of what service they are providing you.