Companies may be losing millions due to emails buried in collapsed Gmail threads
I worked at a place that had many customers who used a major free email provider that also ran an ad network (but was not Google or Microsoft) that kept deciding that most mail we sent to our customers was spam: receipts, installation instructions, responses from support, and notices that subscriptions were going to re-bill were all blocked.<p>We&#x27;d contact them, they would fix things, and it would work for a while...but invariably it would go back to classifying it all as spam, and we&#x27;d get customers calling to complain about not getting instructions or support responses.<p>Finally, our guy who managed our ad spending called up our rep in ad sales at the email company, and asked in rather forceful terms just why we should continue spending $large_number&#x2F;month on ads there to acquire new customers, when we were then going to be blocked from emailing those customers?<p>The ad rep conference called in their head of IT, who conference called in their engineer in charge of spam filtering, and had him right there add us to a whitelist that would prevent anything from us being classified as spam no matter what the rest of their spam system decided. As far as I know we never had another email go into the spam filter.<p>If we hadn&#x27;t been spending a large amount on ads with them, I doubt the problem would ever have been resolved.<p>If you sell a software product to end users, and have non-marketing messages that you need users to see such as responses to support requests or reminders that subscriptions are going to automatically re-bill, I&#x27;d recommend including some kind of messaging system specifically for this in the product itself. Still send them as email, but also send them via this in-product channel, or at least send notices that there is a message with links to a way to view it on the web. Email only is simply not reliable enough.