“In November of 2018, we accidentally fell into spam on all fronts.” How I saved mailing with the company with a million base

“Everything was fine until Black Friday 2018. And then ... 2 months of sleepless nights, finding solutions and testing hypotheses. " Email marketing specialist Ivan Ovoshchnikov told us how to save the newsletter with a million subscribers, which for technical reasons fell into spam.



Hi, I'm Vanya, DreamTeam email marketing specialist. I'll tell you how, after Black Friday, I pulled out a million-base newsletter from spam.
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It all started with this:


Screenshot from Google Postmaster. Since the end of November, the IP reputation collapsed and all letters began to fall into spam


The same thing happened with the domain reputation.

I am telling you why it all happened and how we solved the problem.

Introduction to the company

DreamTeam is an international gaming platform. Hundreds of thousands of gamers find partners for teams here (for example, CS: GO or Apex Legends), develop gaming skills and make money on eSports.

1. Geography: world. More specifically: Europe, USA, Canada, Australia, CIS.
2. Base: ≈ 1,200,000 subscribers.
3. Scope: eSports.
4. For mailings we use 3 services, 4 IP addresses, 2 main domains and 2 subdomains.

Why so many services and IP addresses

All services and domains are needed for different purposes:

• We use one service for mailings for content and trigger letters. We send via 2 subdomains and shared IP-address.
• The second service is used for transactional and service letters. We send through a separate domain and a dedicated IP address.
• The third service is used for mailings about cryptocurrency to a warm base. Email service providers do not like this topic very much and often send cryptocurrency letters to spam. But we have everything in order with the newsletters: the base was collected via the subscription form, and the letters have the opportunity to unsubscribe. Separate service and IP-address are needed for security.

Types of mailings

We send 4 types of mailings:

1. Content mailing about the game. For example, platform updates and e-sports news.
2. Trigger letters. An example of a trigger: the user did not enter the platform for a month, we send him a letter reminding us.
3. Transactional letters: payments, order statuses, etc.
4. Content letters about cryptocurrency. Reports on what work we have done, where and what publications about our cryptocurrency were.

Sample letter

In November 2018, we fell into spam on all fronts.

First content and trigger subdomains and IP

We spent black Friday aggressively: we sent 7 mailings to the whole base. Sent an offer to buy our premium subscription with a big discount. Everywhere the same sentence, but in different words. Plus they said how much time remained until the end of the action.

The subdomain and IP were warmed up - their reputation did not suffer much:

There was a high reputation, has become the average. Not critical

Immediately after Black Friday, I decided to connect a new series of triggers. Used shared IP with a subdomain for content mailings.

In the mailing service (I’ll say right away, not UniSender) the subscribers were in different lists. In each of these lists, you can create segments (for example, by country of residence). I selected the desired segment and added it to the automation. But due to a technical failure, all contacts from the list got there. We sent 20 times more letters than we should have.

I contacted tech support and solved the problem. But the letters have already left, and this has affected the reputation:

Domain and IP reputation dropped to very low

In technical support service just solved the problem. What happened, did not explain.

Next in the spam got mailing about cryptocurrency

I'll start right away with an IP reputation screenshot:

Email reputation and cryptocurrency dropped to very low in late November

Reputation deteriorated on December 1st. But everything is simple - we bought 2 dedicated IP-addresses and, as it turned out, our service for mailings did not warm them up (or warmed up poorly).

The last service and transactional letters fell.

In mid-December, Google simply decided that spam was often sent from our domain. This is noticeable by the sharp drop in openability:

Openness of service and transactional letters fell more than 2 times

Nevertheless, the reputation of the domain and IP was at an excellent level.

Mailings got into spam despite the excellent reputation of the domain and IP

How to decide and how much time spent on it

Let's go from simple to complex.

Transactional and Service Letters

Did not do anything. Seriously, just waited. As a result, after 2 weeks, the opening rates leveled off and everything became good again. Written off on the "quirks" of Google.

Cryptocurrency newsletters

Heated a new IP-address, sending letters only to a warm audience. As a result, the second mailing from the new IP-address gave a high rate of discovery.

UniSender results. Already the second dispatch from the new IP gave 41% of discoveries


A warm audience in our case is investors. They invested their money in our project, so they read our reports with pleasure in letters.

How to warm up the IP. I increased the number of emails sent by 10% every day, starting from 2000. This method is described in detail in my article on warming up a domain in the UniSender blog. In short, I will say that I distinguish 3 ways of warming up: safe and slow, fast and risky, and medium in speed and risk. This method is safe.

Triggers and content distribution

Here they wanted to connect a specialist and buy a new IP address with a new subdomain, but ...

The solution turned out to be simple - it was necessary to warm up the old subdomains and the IP address. I had a hypothesis that it might work, and it worked. Subdomains and IP were heated in the same safe way.

As a result, we took all the users who opened at least 1 of the Black Friday emails, and conducted 2 content mailings. The first newsletter left the subdomain for content, the other - from the subdomain for triggers.

After these 2 mailings we received a high reputation of subdomains and IP addresses. We went to the previous volumes and continued mailing.

Thanks to the warm-up, the IP reputation has gradually improved.


The same thing happened with the domain reputation.

This is what happens if you send too many letters through the database. But even this seemingly hopeless situation was resolved.

From this whole situation, I made 3 conclusions.

Test triggers. Before launching new automatic triggers (for example, segmentation by countries, as in my example), it was necessary to test the number of people to whom they will be sent. To do this, in the automation it was necessary to add the parameter “wait 1 day (maybe a little less)”, see how many people will fall into the automation and then either connect the letters or report the bug.

Send only from the heated IP. You should always check whether the purchased IP address is really warm from the provider. If not, warm up by yourself. More on this here and here .

Gmail is sometimes naughty. It may just lower the reputation of your domain and ip below the baseboard. If you know for sure that you are not a spammer (your letters have decent opening rates) and if even with a fallen reputation your subscribers continue to read your letters, then just wait a couple of weeks - the reputation will be restored. But during this period it is better not to increase the volume of mailings.