📩 What you need to know about the new spam rules of two major email platforms

Submitted by Leslie Marinelli

Gmail and Yahoo recently announced big changes to the algorithm they use to determine whether incoming emails make it into the regular inbox or go to the spam or promotions folder. These changes are in effect as of February 1, 2024. 

Spam or spam email is unsolicited and unwanted junk email sent out in bulk to an indiscriminate recipient list. 

Email is one of our most important tools for communicating with our patrons so we are actively managing this shift in email spam rules to ensure our emails arrive in our patrons’ inboxes. 

You and our patrons may notice some subtle changes to the emails sent from FCPL in the near future, so we want to keep you informed about what we are doing behind the scenes to communicate with our patrons. 

Changes to Our Automated Emails and Subscription Newsletters:

• We are revising the footers in our emails to include a physical address per CAN-SPAM Act requirements. 
  
  
• We are exploring options for changing the reply-to address of some automated emails to replace the “noreply@forsythpl.org” email which can appear “spammy.” 
  
  
• Our monthly @ FCPL newsletter has undergone some subtle changes over the past few months to help our emails stand out in patrons’ inboxes and get opened. Colorful emojis, enticing subject lines, strategic calls to action, and a more personal “from” address (Leslie | FoCo Library) are all intentional marketing strategies to improve our email recipient engagement. 

The reputation of an email sender can be harmed if too many recipients mark that organization’s emails as spam. Other factors that can impact sender reputation are engagement metrics and recipient inaction (never opening an email from a particular sender or deleting an email without reading it). 

To reduce the likelihood of our emails being labeled as spam, we are also exploring the option of possibly changing our monthly newsletter from “opt out” to “opt in.” This strategy will ensure our monthly newsletter is targeted to the audience that most wants to receive it. 

If a patron asks you to unsubscribe them from any of our emails, please help them change the notification method on their Polaris account to something other than email, or walk them through how to unsubscribe themselves from our newsletters. (They should click the "Unsubscribe" link in the footer of their newsletter.)

If a patron speaks to you about emails from the Library, please ask them to not mark our messages as spam. With the changes recently made by Gmail and Yahoo, user feedback that marks messages from a sender as spam can cause all messages from that sender to any Gmail or Yahoo email addresses to be blocked.