Spam concerns, abuse monitoring, and Google quotas

Ensuring that your emails are received can be a challenge. Mailshake takes spam seriously and works to block abusers as part of our effort to maintain high deliverability.

Steps you can take in Mailshake to improve deliverability:

1. Adjust your sending calendar to space out your sends and limit how many emails you send each day
2. If you have a tech wizard on hand, create a custom tracking domain for your team
3. Disable open tracking when sending very short messages

Important information on Mailshake's abuse monitoring:

By using Mailshake you are responsible for sending authentic emails and following all pertinent spam laws. If our monitoring system flags your account's sending history we will send you a warning via email. If our monitoring system flags your team a second time, Mailshake will automatically block your sending. At that point you'll need to request unblocking by sending an email to compliance@mailshake.com to discuss your case.

General advice:

The internet is flush with thoughts on this topic, but here are some top suggestions:

1. If your email address or domain is relatively new, ramp up your sending volume slowly over several weeks before sending out larger quantities of emails.
2. Avoid sending lots of mail that "looks" the same. Lots of near-duplicate emails going out can trigger spam filters.
3. When sending very short emails, disable open tracking in Mailshake. Emails that are light on text but contain images (open tracking adds a small, invisible image) are penalized by spam filters
4. Avoid spammy-sounding content
5. Avoid including multiple images
6. Include your physical address in your email
7. Include a note in your email footer that says something like: To stop receiving emails from me, just reply with the word "unsubscribe." Alternatively you can add an unsubscribe link to your signature.
8. Keep your email content clean and simple with minimal formatting
9. Make sure your recipient lists were properly collected
10. When you get a bounce notice of a spam filter catching one of your emails, see if they offer ways to communicate with them to find out exactly what went wrong (sometimes there's a link in the bounce message for more information). 

For sending from Google accounts:

1. Avoid sending email from a @gmail.com address. You'll have better deliverability with a properly set up G Suite account
2. If you're using a G Suite account, make sure your DNS records are updated to include the proper SPF and DKIM records for Google.
   
   Mailshake doesn't actually send emails itself, instead it simply tells Google to send your emails. This means that your SPF and DKIM records for Google will work with Mailshake sends.
3. Avoid sending via G Suite accounts that are still in their free trial

For sending with SMTP:

1. Make sure you have SPF and DKIM records set up in your domain's DNS settings. Your email provider should have help articles for how to do this that's specific to their system.
2. Refer to your email provider for best practices.

Quotas:

When you send emails via Mailshake, you agree to ensure your sending account stays within your mail provider's quota limits across all email-sending apps (Mailshake, apps on your phone, etc). Check out how many emails you can send per day here.

That being said, your mail provider retains the right to throttle your account for any reason, after which you will receive notices that you've hit your quota. We understand this can be very frustrating Our advice is to refer to the above tips on avoiding being flagged as a spammer. The good news at least is that Mailshake detects when a quota was hit and we automatically pause sending for a period of time before resuming. Once the quota period is over, your campaigns will automatically restart.

If you have questions about why you hit a quota lower than your normal sending limit, you'll want to reach out to your mail provider directly as Mailshake doesn't control these quotas.