What should email senders do about the Gmail bounce issues?

Email marketer from Stack Overflow answers to implement automated bounce processing in their email sending infrastructure. This involves parsing bounce messages, identifying the cause of the bounce, and automatically updating the email list to reflect the delivery failure.

Email marketer from Mailjet shares that a critical step in managing bounce issues is to differentiate between hard and soft bounces. Hard bounces indicate permanent delivery failures (invalid email addresses), requiring immediate removal from the mailing list. Soft bounces, which are temporary issues (full inbox), should be monitored and the addresses removed if bounces persist over time.

Marketer from Email Geeks explains their plan is to resubscribe and remove suppressions for anyone who bounced with the 550 GSMTP response during the time period of Dec 14th 2100 - Dec 16th 0001 (GMT).

Marketer from Email Geeks shares that SendGrid will be purging all gmail/gsuite addresses that bounced during the incident. Doing this across the entire user base will take a while, but it will get done sooner rather than later.

Email marketer from SuperOffice shares that regularly cleaning your email list is essential for maintaining a healthy sender reputation and improving email deliverability. This involves removing inactive subscribers, bounced email addresses, and recipients who have unsubscribed or marked your emails as spam.

Marketer from Email Geeks shares that they cleared up Gmail bounces for during the hours when the outage lasted in their internal database, but also cleared up bounce suppression list on their ESP for their senders. If the ESP bounce suppression isn't cleared, it can ping back to the internal database that emails are still marked as bounced.

Email marketer from Reddit shares that after experiencing a surge in hard bounces, you should immediately suppress those email addresses to prevent further sending attempts. Continuously emailing invalid addresses can severely damage your sender reputation, leading to increased spam filtering.

Email marketer from Litmus explains that A/B testing different subject lines, content, and sending times can help optimize email performance. By identifying which elements resonate best with your audience, you can improve engagement and reduce the likelihood of emails being marked as spam, thereby mitigating bounce issues related to content or timing.

Email marketer from Email on Acid shares that utilizing email list validation services to verify the accuracy and deliverability of email addresses before sending can help to remove invalid addresses, reducing hard bounces and maintaining a clean email list.

Email marketer from Sendinblue responds that to reduce the impact of bounce issues, email senders must authenticate their emails using protocols like SPF, DKIM, and DMARC. These authentication methods verify the sender's identity, improving deliverability and reducing the likelihood of emails being marked as spam. Regular list cleaning is essential to remove bad emails. Also setting up a feedback loop to handle bounce messages is also a good idea.

Email marketer from GMass responds that sender reputation is critical for email deliverability. You can improve your sender reputation by consistently sending valuable content that your audience wants to receive, avoiding spam triggers in your email subject lines and body, and authenticating your emails with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC.

Email marketer from MarketingProfs shares that using a dedicated IP address for sending emails can provide greater control over your sender reputation. A dedicated IP address allows you to build a positive sending history, which can improve email deliverability and reduce the likelihood of bounces.

Marketer from Email Geeks recommends purging suppression bounce list on your ESP. Otherwise if purge only on internal DB, ESP might then ping back for all those emails restored them as ‘Bounce drops’, resetting the status again in internal DB.

Email marketer from Neil Patel's Blog explains that to maintain a healthy sender reputation, email senders should segment their email list to target specific demographics, implement a double opt-in process to ensure recipients want to receive emails, clean their email list regularly to remove inactive or invalid addresses, and monitor bounce rates to identify and address any delivery issues.

Expert from Email Geeks explains that other folks are definitely reporting problems with Gmail and it seems to be coming and going. She also notes that at least the Google bounces are easy to filter as they all have gsmtp in the text of the rejection.

Expert from Spam Resource shares that handling hard bounces requires immediate action to remove the invalid email addresses from your mailing list. Failing to do so can damage your sender reputation and increase the likelihood of being marked as spam by email providers like Gmail.

Expert from Word to the Wise explains that diagnosing deliverability issues at Gmail requires a multi-faceted approach. This includes checking authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), monitoring IP and domain reputation via Google Postmaster Tools, and analyzing bounce messages for clues about the cause of the failures.

Documentation from Microsoft explains that understanding the structure and content of non-delivery reports (NDRs), also known as bounce messages, is essential for diagnosing email delivery issues. NDRs contain specific error codes and diagnostic information that can help identify the cause of bounces and guide remediation efforts.

Documentation from Google explains that using Google Postmaster Tools, email senders can monitor their sender reputation with Gmail users. This tool provides insights into spam rates, feedback loop scores, and authentication status, allowing senders to identify and address issues that may be causing bounces or deliverability problems.

Documentation from DKIM explains that DKIM, or DomainKeys Identified Mail, helps prevent email spoofing. By adding a digital signature to outgoing emails, DKIM provides a way for recipient mail servers to verify that the email was indeed sent by the domain it claims to be from. This is crucial for maintaining email deliverability and avoiding being marked as spam.

Documentation from RFC Editor explains that SMTP servers respond with specific error codes to indicate the reason for email delivery failures. Understanding these codes is crucial for diagnosing and addressing bounce issues. For example, a 5xx code indicates a permanent failure, while a 4xx code indicates a temporary failure.