<img height="1" width="1" style="display:none" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=1822615684631785&amp;ev=PageView&amp;noscript=1"/>

Month: June 2016

With a recent increase in GMass’s popularity has come an increased number of reports of Google accounts getting suspended after having used GMass. In most cases it’s spammy behavior that leads to an account suspension. It’s important to note that:

  • GMass can’t control whether Google suspends an account, nor can it help re-activate a suspended account.
  • GMass is simply a conduit to unleashing the power and full sending capabilities of your Gmail account. GMass doesn’t have the ability to skirt Gmail’s rules or give you greater sending ability than you already have.
What happens when your account gets suspended or your emails get bounced?
We’ve found that there are different levels of bounces and blocking, ranging from Gmail bouncing your outgoing emails because Google determines they’re spammy to a suspension of an entire Google account.
At the most basic level, Gmail might bounce your outgoing email with this bounce message, when you try to send:
You may also see this warning the next time you log in to your account:

 

Lastly, if your account gets suspended, you may get this email sent to your recovery email account:

 

How do you prevent your account from getting suspended?
The basic rule to prevent your account from getting suspended is to not violate Google’s Terms of Service. These are some general guidelines that will help:
  1. Don’t use GMass to send spam from your Gmail account.
  2. Don’t set up a new Gmail account and immediately send hundreds of emails with it. Despite Google stating that you can send 500 emails/day from a regular Gmail account, you can’t do that from a new Gmail account that you created minutes ago. If that was possible, spammers would certainly take advantage by creating hundreds of Gmail accounts and sending 500 emails through each account.
  3. If you’ve never sent a mass email from your Gmail account before, start by sending a lower quantity of emails and then ramping up.
  4. We’ve found that Google Apps account have greater flexibility with sending than regular Gmail accounts. We’ve noticed that even a new Google Apps account has substantial sending ability, allowing almost the 2,000 email daily limit, whereas a new Gmail account won’t have immediate mass emailing abilities.

Ultimately each individual GMass user is responsible for his or her Google account. In most cases, if you’re a responsible sender sending emails to people who want your emails, you shouldn’t encounter any of these issues. Of course, there are exceptions. In rare cases, we’ve seen reports of legitimate senders getting temporarily suspended for sending a relatively low quantity of mass emails.

What should you do if your account is suspended?

Follow Google’s instructions by starting your appeal here.

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?


GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE
Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   

Auto Repair Business Beats the Internet Coupons with Targeted Email Marketing
Larry Miller is a 30-year veteran of the auto repair business in south Florida. While the large dealerships and auto-repair chains called him a “technician,” he prefers “wrench turner” or even “grease monkey.” He told us recently that he worked very hard for others for too long, and always dreamed of someday being his own boss. A greasy entrepreneur, I asked him? He said he’s ok with that.
Larry took the leap and started his own business in 2014, taking many customers with him. He is a rare breed of tradesmen who follow the “always do the right thing” philosophy and his customers appreciate that….most of the time.
In his first two years in business Larry would occasionally run into a customer who hadn’t visited his

shop for a while and he would ask where he or she had been. Invariably the customer would reply “well, I saw a coupon on the internet from the big dealership for a cheap oil change, so I dropped by over there.” Dismayed but undaunted, Larry tried to figure out how to stop losing his customers to his former employers.

A friend told him about email marketing, so Larry started collecting email addresses from every customer with the promise that he would send news about special deals on repairs and promised to beat any coupon.
Larry tried one of the big email marketing companies, but had a tough time trying to use the graphic design templates. He also couldn’t figure out the tracking and other tools and was about to give up when he found GMass.
“Keeping a running list on Google sheets is easy, and typing up my monthly messages takes about 10 minutes,” he told us. “I keep it simple, the customers get my mail, and it’s really easy.”
Larry figured out how to add a column on the spreadsheet for dates-of-service and now he sends a mass email each month to customers who are due for an oil change or check-up.
“Basically I’m doing the same thing the big guys do, but on a smaller scale,” Larry said. I feel like I’m controlling my business, which is satisfying.”


 Larry loves that GMass is free, but says he will gladly pay whatever it costs when the day comes there is a fee. “It’s a business expense,” Larry said. “But this one brings me a lot more more business.” 

GMass is an extension for Chrome and Gmail. It installs easily and is a very robust and versatile platform for sending mass-email messages. Click here to watch a video on YouTube that will guide you through the set-up.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE
Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   

Overview

GMass is a unique service in the email marketing space because it’s built on top of Gmail. That means, unlike a traditional email marketing service like MailChimp, GMass doesn’t have any email sending servers or sending IP addresses. All emails are sent from our users’ Gmail accounts and therefore through Gmail’s IP addresses. The benefit of this is that your emails are sent through the world’s highest deliverability servers, since virtually nobody blocks Gmail’s IP addresses.

This, however, doesn’t mean that our users are immune to getting blocked. If the content of your email is deemed spammy, then Gmail itself may block your account, or your recipients’ email servers may block your emails.

GMass doesn’t monitor its users

GMass intentionally doesn’t monitor its users. Meaning, accounts don’t need to be approved before you can start using GMass to send an email marketing campaign. Why don’t we police our users? Because Google does most of the policing for us. If you use GMass to send spam, it’s likely that Google’s automated systems will be triggered and your Gmail account will be terminated. It’s unlikely that we’d be able to develop a better algorithm than Google already has in place for detecting and terminating spammers.
However, even Google’s spam detection mechanisms might not be fast enough in some cases. Lots of spammers succeed in using GMass to send some spam out before Google notices and terminates the associated Gmail account.

Your emails could be blocked

Because of that, it’s possible for your legitimate emails to become associated with a spammer’s emails and for you to also get blocked. How are your emails connected to the spammer’s emails? If you’re using GMass’s open tracking, click tracking, or unsubscribe features, then a “tracking domain” is inserted into your email to allow those features to work. If you’re using open tracking, then an invisible pixel is placed at the bottom of your emails, and the domain referenced is the tracking domain. If you’re click tracking your links, the links are altered so that the GMass server is hit first to record the click, and that’s done by way of the tracking domain. Unless you’ve set up your own custom tracking domain, GMass uses shared tracking domains across accounts. Typical shared tracking domains look like gmss1.com or gm.ag or gmss1.net. They are variations of the word “gmass” with the vowels removed, using various Top Level Domain (TLD) extensions from .ag to .net to .com.

Some spam filters catalog domains that are commonly found in spammy messages, so if your emails contain the same tracking domain as the spammer’s emails, then your emails can also get blocked.

This screenshot shows an example of the role a tracking domain plays in your GMass sent emails. In this case, the tracking domain “gm.ag” is used to track clicks of the reddit link.

The simple one-step solution

 The solution is a simple one. Your accounts should use a tracking domain that is specific to just your email campaigns.

If you are able to add a DNS record for your domain…

You can easily set up a branded tracking domain for your GMass accounts that is based on your OWN domain name.

If you can’t add a DNS record or this is too technical for you…

If you don’t know how to manage DNS records, register a new domain from scratch for use with GMass.

Regardless of whether you have a Gmail account or a Google Apps account, you can take advantage of this capability.

That is the single most important step you can take to maximize your deliverability and avoid blocking issues.

And even better: GMass is one of the only email service providers that serves tracking links over HTTPS, rather than the less secure HTTP. That step will help improve your deliverability even more.

Re-sending your campaign to those that blocked you

 After a tracking domain has been set on your account, you may want to resend your campaign to anyone that blocked you previously. Here is how to do that.
Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE
Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   

If you’ve sent an email campaign with GMass, or even a test message to yourself, never copy/paste that message from your Sent Mail or Inbox into a new Compose window.

Why?

Once the email is sent, elements of it are personalized to each recipient, like the unsubscribe link, the click-tracked links, and the open-tracking pixel. If you then copy/paste that email, which has already been tagged specifically for one recipient, into a new GMass campaign, then everybody that gets the new campaign will get an unsubscribe link that unsubscribes just that one email address, and links to click that will make it look like that one email address is clicking (not the actual recipient) and all opens will be registered to that one address.

In fact, this rule doesn’t apply to just GMass. It applies to any email marketing system, even traditional ESPs like MailChimp and JangoMail. If you use a traditional ESP to send yourself a test email, never copy/paste that test email back into a new campaign to send to hundreds of email addresses.

GMass is now preventing emails that contain already click-tracked links from being sent. If you copy/paste an old sent campaign into a new campaign and use the GMass button to send it, you may receive a yellow status message error that looks like:

You will also receive a report in your Inbox listing the offending links that need to be removed or changed.

How do you fix this?

To correct the issue, you’ll need to modify your links, so that they link to the actual website you wish to send your recipients to, rather than the GMass click-tracked URL. If you encounter this issue, a report will be sent to your Inbox listing the click-tracked URLs and the original URLs they should be replaced with.

In the Gmail Compose window, hover over each link and click it. Gmail will display its destination. Find the offending links, and modify them to point to the original URL.

How can I avoid this issue altogether?

For loading prior GMass content into the Gmail Compose window, use the Load Content dropdown instead of copying/pasting content between campaigns.

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?


GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE
Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   

If you’re new to GMass or new to email marketing, these resources might help you get started:

1. GMass YouTube Videos

2. GMass Getting Started Guide (PDF)

The animations on the GMass homepage also show how to quickly get started using GMass.

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge all in one tool — that works inside Gmail


TRY GMASS FOR FREE
Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   

GMass