Hi there,
Many users have reported to me that the emails they get are delivered to their promotional folder in Gmail and not their inbox.
Is there anything we can do to bypass that? Obviously a summary email or a personal message is not a promotional email.
Many thanks for your help in advance folks!
The easiest solution would be to ask your users to “train” Gmail by moving the emails to the main inbox tab. Once they do it the first time for a single email, Gmail will ask if they want future messages from the from email your site uses to send emails to be placed in the inbox, and that should solve it for them once they answer Yes.
Thanks for that.
I don’t think we are at a position where we can ask all users to do that unfortunately. I was wondering if there’s a way to customize the emails to help them appear in the inbox instead.
Have you set up SPF and DKIM records for your domain? It can also help to not use a reply to address of noreply, support, etc.
Thanks!
I believe we do send it from support@ourdomain.com however it is a reply-to address. Just to clarify you’re suggesting:
Is that right?
“Train the Users” doesn’t really work for us either. Hard enough to train them how to “Quote”!!
We would really benefit from a best practice guide for Discourse emails so that they end up where we want them delivered by default. In our community there has been a widespread roll-out of Office 365, which means that email sorting into “Focussed” and “Other” by default. Yup, Discourse ones end up in “Other” and thus are never read.
This resonates with me.
I think that educating users work in some scenarios, but that strictly depends on the type of forum.
I didn’t know Office 365 does that too.
80-85% of our users are using gmail so that’s our main issue.
This is what I have read may help, I don’t know if there is any validity to it and haven’t tried it myself, but something you might try. I would say the DKIM and SPF records are more important.
You need to be absolutely sure your mail settings are in order. This is documented extensively.
If you have a domain name which is poisoned due to previous association with spam, or an email IP address that is poisoned due to previous association with spam, there may be nothing you can do other than changing your domain and or email server IP address.
I did some more testing yesterday.
@davidkingham - DKIM and SPF are 100% set on all my domains so that can’t be the issue.
I’ve tested several Gmail boxes and even tried to change the domain - for example instead of domain.com we have forum.domain.com for our discourse. That didn’t seem to make a difference.
@codinghorror our mail settings are set correctly as far as I’m aware, we don’t have an issue with spam but rather with Google flagging almost every mail as promotions.
We do send promotional emails, but obviously our discourse forum isn’t promotional but rather updates (digest) or private messages.
Not sure what to do really.
Even emails that have all their settings correct can end up in Promotions.
Whether an email ends up there also depends on things like (amongst others) the length (longer is worse) amount of links and the amount of embedded images (more is worse).
I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen some emails (summary?) show up in promotions and others (login link?) show up in inbox from the same discourse site. I suspect that you will need to train your users or reprogram Gmail.
things like (amongst others) the length (longer is worse) amount of links and the amount of embedded images (more is worse).
I actually did test it last night and saw that even plain text from a specific account or with specific text (let’s say “password reset”) were still going to promotions tab.
However, a personal email from the domain saying how are you and let’s catch up went straight to the primary box…
I’m fairly certain that I’ve seen some emails (summary?) show up in promotions and others (login link?) show up in inbox from the same discourse site. I suspect that you will need to train your users or reprogram Gmail.
From my experience everything apart from some private messages goes to the promotions tab.
I’m not sure why, because the digest is more suited to the forums tab, or updates tab. I get that it’s not a personal conversation but it’s not a promotion of any sort either.
It sounds like you have everything set up correctly so there’s really nothing else you can do besides encouraging your users to move it to the inbox. The summary emails are bound to go to promotions, they have a fair amount of HTML, potentially lots of images, tons of links. These are all the things that they look for when deciding which tab it goes to.
It will be tricky, but it seems to be the best option so far.
I appreciate that.
I think though that because of this, my entire domain is by default going to promotions - even when we send a forgot password email it foes there…
The only scenario which I’ve managed to get to the primary box is by testing a very personal email. As soon as I write (even a plain text, no html) email with “forgot password” of some sorts it goes to the promotion tab.
At the same time, I did notice some emails from other companies, like Uber for example which I’ve forgotten the password for, in the promotions tab 
So after a lot of digging, there seems to be no real conclusion.
I have tried several email addresses and changed to site name too. Only one worked, and only for private messages, which is a start I guess. Digest never seemed to work - perhaps it is just too HTML heavy?
You’ve done some excellent sleuthing in this topic, and it is greatly appreciated 
However as you noted, this is “magic sorting hat” code on Google’s end so there’s a limit to what we can control here, unfortunately…
Totally. I am not blaming discourse for a second here - you are doing an amazing job and I want to contribute as much as I can.
Here’s what I conclude after several pretty much a week of research - the actual domain, subject, and “from” matter as much as the actual message. I assume that (as expected) html heavy emails (images & links to be precise) are a no-go.
Also, MailJet isn’t really helping as apparently they send bulk marketing emails and transactional ones in the exact same way.
SPF, DKIM, DMARC makes a difference - but probably not as much as said above. At least from my testing, I didn’t have DMARC initially, for example but that didn’t make a difference.
I think I can live with having only the PM and (hopefully) post replies arrive at the primary inbox and have the digest email land at the promotions tab.
To be fair, I think the summary email is a promotional email and it is designed that way. Also, it’s not the most important email. I mean, it gets people back on the forum, but it’s less important than missing a private message or a reply to your topic, in my opinion.
Also consider enabling the “Forums” and “Updates” tabs; most of my Discourse summary emails land in Forums.