Google Spam Policy Changes

[JenniferT088]

Google recently announced changes to its Spam Policy that will effectively eliminate email open tracking. According to BTB Venture Group, Gmail will now flag emails that have pixels that track whether the recipient opens the email, mark them as “suspicious or spam” and move them into a spam folder. What is Constant Contact doing so that our emails aren't getting flagged as spam or suspicious? Thank you.

[Tara_N · Accepted solution]

Hello @JenniferT088 ,

Thank you for bringing this to our attention.  I work in our email deliverability group here at Constant Contact, and keep track of industry changes and updates so I can make sure our customers are setup for success. 

I did find the article posted by BTB Venture Group on LinkedIn, and would like to assure you that most of the content there came from a (yet to be substantiated) claim started on LinkedIn sometime in August.  I can assure that I track our open rates every day, and while there are definitely instances where different receiving domains are pre-fetching the images which sometimes makes this data less useful, there is no evidence to support that simply having an open pixel is going to get you placed in the spam folder at Gmail.  If a sender is having issues with the spam folder or getting “this message looks suspicious” banners in Gmail, it is most likely due to domain reputation issues and not simply because they have an open pixel in their message. 

Industry expert Al Iverson over at Spam Resource posted specifically about this around the time that claim got started on LinkedIn. 

[MorA]

just tested it, with tracking pixel,  spam message and hidden images in gmail, without tracking pixel no spam message in gmail, and images not hidden, what more evidence to you need?

[Caitlin_M]

HI @MorA. Are you inquiring about the same message as above? Are you seeing the email being marked as spam in your reporting? Please provide us with more information. 

[MorA]

Hi Caitlin, Yes same message.

When we include the tracking code in our email, and send the test, 

Gmail, mobile and browser client, shows the Grey Spam warning, and hides images.

When we remove the tracking code, The message goes away. and no imaqe are hidden. 

We use MJML to build the emails, if we use the "errors detected" "no tracking pixel" warnings and feature to fix the error and insert the tracking pixel code, it gets inserted after the opening body tag. 

[MorA]

"  If a sender is having issues with the spam folder or getting “this message looks suspicious” banners in Gmail, it is most likely due to domain reputation issues and not simply because they have an open pixel in their message. " 

This seems like nonsense to me, i get it, if you can blame an issue on something you don't have to fix, its a common human psychological reaction, however, from our experience, its the position of the tracking pixel code that is causing "this message looks suspicious"  banners. Moving the tracking pixel markup to the END of the  html manually, before the closing body tag, these gmail warnings go away

[MorA]

So today we put out an email campaign, and the system would not let us proceed WITHOUT the tracking pixel code, which we were prepared to do, and we decided opens tracking was not as important as a big spam message mentioning malicious emials, but the system would not let us continue with the "errors" in the code. So we noticed that when using the built in "let us fix it" feature, the tracking code is being inserted immediately after the body tag. If we MANUALLY added the code at the very end, before the closing body tag, the gmail client spam warning and malicious email warning that hides the header image, magically went away, we tested this a few times, on different gmail mobile devices AND desktop devices, and so we went this direction. So it seems on our end, that the automatic fix, that puts the tracking pixel right after the body tag, is a huge problem. 

[Caitlin_M]

Hi @MorA. A member of our delivery team is going to contact you to follow up on this post and further investigate the tracking pixel.