How to reduce the chances of Gmail dumping real emails into spam

Gmail dumps the real spam allright. But every twopence ISP will do that nowadays. The problem is that Gmail dumps loads of real emails. It seems to have reverted to the old and long-discredited methods like

• email with a URL in it, especially a short one
• email which is just very short; only a few words
• email which shows certain signs of being generated by a machine

OTOH I know of two Gmail users who never seem to have lost emails from me. Just two of them!

The Gmail spam box is about 10% of the problem. It’s the ones which are dumped totally that are the main problem.

I don’t think the problem is simple though because as I said some people find it works OK. Well, at least they seem to reply to the ones I send, or they don’t indicate that some went missing.

So there may be a special factor which makes a key difference.

As per my other post in the IT section, putting the intended sender in the Contacts probably helps. Creating a filter rule for that sender may well also work. It would make perfect sense to implement that!

But these provisions only work on the email address. Most spam is sent with a forged From: header, so Gmail is going to be looking for other indicators. I am sure that if I sent you an authentic looking viagra advert, especially with an executable file attached, you would not receive that email. OTOH, FWIW, with Messagelabs, I can configure it to always receive whitelisted senders no matter what is attached (virus checking is optional).

Len – I have just sent you two emails which fairly reliably get dumped by Gmail.

I have just discovered this

It has been “anecdotally known” that adding a known OK sender into your Gmail Contacts book, and creating a folder for him/her, helps to prevent the incoming email being misidentified as spam. But this is the first time I have seen it in writing from Google.

Still, it is not a complete solution. Lots of people still get email from both
EuroGA (PMs i.e. from )
and from me at EuroGA ()
into their gmail spam boxes.

Does anyone know if the above whitelisting advice for gmail is still current?

With half of the people here being on gmail, it’s staggering that there seems to be nobody who knows

I don’t use gmail so did a google and it seems that gmail does now (year 2022) offer a proper way to whitelist a sender – e.g. here

SPF, I’ve been around many times and it should be right for *@euroga.org. DKIM likewise. DMARC, I have not played with.

But as you know none of this is clear cut. DKIM just proves the domain in the From: header has config access to the DNS record of that domain. I could set up iamaconman.com and send out emails with perfect SPF and perfect DKIM.
Nobody “real” should be dumping incoming emails because DKIM doesn’t match… what about a sender on gmail.com ??

Gmail has a long history of crap “rules” e.g. a one word email (to a long term established recipient) would be dumped every time, 2+ words would be ok. Only a committee which has way too many sofas could have come up with something that stupid

Google has just implemented a hard policy on requiring either SPF or DKIM. And it absolutely dumps everything else regardless of content or whether the sender is “whitelisted” which according to “various suggestions” (nobody actually knows) is done by setting up a folder for the sender.

This is dumb but google owns the world now and most people use gmail so they got you by the balls. SPF is impossible to fix once and for all time but most domain hosting services which offer email sending also offer free DKIM.