Gmail Guidelines for Bulk Senders

Yesterday Bronto's DJ Waldow pointed a fellow member of the Email Marketer's Club to a page that contains guidelines for email marketers to get their emails delivered in the Gmail inbox.

Some key take-aways:

• Use a consistent IP address to send email.
• Use the same "from" header on every email you send.
• Keep valid reverse DNS records for the IP address(es) from which you send email and point them to your domain.
• Publish an SPF record and sign with DomainKeys.
• Automatically unsubscribe users whose addresses bounce multiple pieces of mail.
• Provide a 'List-Unsubscribe' header which points to a web form where the user can unsubscribe easily from future mailings.
• Explicitly indicate the email address subscribed to your list.
• All bulk messages you send must be formatted according to RFC 2822 SMTP standards and, if using HTML, w3.org standards.
• Messages should indicate that they are bulk mail, using the 'Precedence: bulk' header field.
• The subject of each message should be relevant to the body's content and not be misleading.
• Gmail does not accept 'whitelisting' requests from bulk senders.

There are two important factors that, under normal circumstances, help messages arrive in Gmail users' inboxes:

• The 'From:' address is listed in the user's Contacts list.
• A user clicks 'Not Spam' to alert Gmail that messages sent from that address are solicited.

If you are sending mail in accordance with their guidelines and Gmail continues to mark your messages as spam, you can contact the Gmail Team.

Read more here.