You will be able to explain the signals inbox providers use to decide between the inbox, a promotions tab and the spam folder.
Mei Ling sent her first proper newsletter to 180 subscribers, and over the following week she heard three different stories about it. One regular found it by accident in her spam folder, among the lottery wins. Another saw it under the promotions tab, and a third read it in her main inbox over breakfast, though all three had received the same email at the same minute.
None of those decisions was random. Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo and every other inbox provider run filters on each message that arrives, and the filters are trying to answer one question: does this person want this email? This lesson covers the signals they use, so you can see what you control.
The biggest signal is the sender's reputation: the record an inbox provider builds up about your sending over time. It attaches mainly to your domain, the part of your address after the @, and to the servers that send your mail. When you send through an email tool, you share some servers with the tool's other customers, which is one reason good tools police their customers' lists so carefully.
Reputation builds slowly and drops fast. Months of sending wanted email to people who engage with it build a good one. A single send to an old or bought list, full of dead addresses and people who complain, can damage it in a day. And because it is tied to your domain, the damage spreads beyond the newsletter. Your invoices, quotes and replies to customers come from the same domain.
Authentication is part of this picture too. Providers check whether an email really came from the domain it claims, using three records called SPF, DKIM and DMARC. Lesson 3.2, SPF, DKIM and DMARC in plain words, explains each one. For now, know that unauthenticated mail starts at a disadvantage.
Inbox providers watch how their users treat your mail. Some actions tell them people want it: opening, reading, replying, clicking, adding you to contacts, and especially moving a message out of the spam folder into the inbox. Other actions tell them the opposite: deleting without opening, ignoring message after message, and above all pressing the report spam button.
This is why list quality from module 1 and opt-in from lesson 2.3 matter so much for delivery. A list of people who asked to hear from you produces the good signals naturally. A list of people who forgot they signed up produces the bad ones, however well the email is written.
It is also why replies are worth encouraging. Priya ends her fortnightly tip with "Reply and tell me which topic your child finds hardest". Each parent who writes back shows their inbox provider that people answer her mail, and lesson 4.1 comes back to why that helps.
Inbox providers also watch patterns. A domain that has sent a few emails a week for months and suddenly sends thousands in an hour looks a lot like a spammer who has just taken over an account. A brand-new domain that starts with a large send looks like a spammer who has just set one up.
So new senders should start small and grow steadily. Begin with your most engaged contacts, the recent signups and frequent buyers, and widen to the rest over several sends. Do the same after a move to a new domain or tool. Tools call this warming up, and most publish their own advice on the pace, which beats a number quoted on a forum.
The same applies when you have not emailed a list for a long time. A list that sat untouched for a year has gone stale, and lesson 3.4 shows how to handle that safely.
Gmail sorts incoming mail into tabs for many users, and marketing email often lands in Promotions. Plenty of business owners see that as a defeat and start hunting for tricks to escape, though there is little reason to.
Mail in the promotions tab has been delivered. The provider has decided it is legitimate and wanted, just commercial. People who use the tab go there when they are in the mood to look at offers and newsletters, and subscribers who value your email find it there. Spam is a different place entirely: mail there is treated as unwanted, and most people never look.
Some of your readers will move your email to Primary, and the provider learns from that. The rest will read it in Promotions. Either way you are in front of them, which is the goal.
You cannot see inside the filters, but you can see results. Send a test to addresses you control at different providers and note where each one lands. Then look at the message headers. In Gmail, the menu on an open message includes an option to show the original, which displays whether SPF, DKIM and DMARC passed. Outlook offers a similar view of the message source or details.
The activity below asks you to run exactly that check with a Gmail and an Outlook address, and to write down where each test landed and what the headers say about authentication.
Send a test email from your tool to a Gmail and an Outlook address, note where each one lands, and record what the headers say about authentication.
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