Deliverability
Black Friday sending and reputation monitoring: Deliverability Academy Recap
That gap was the starting point for Mailgun’s latest Email Deliverability Academy webinar. Host Thomas [verify: surname] sat down with Mailgun’s Alison Gootee, Nick Schafer, and JT Torres, plus Customer.io’s Brad Gurley, to walk through how senders should prepare for, monitor, and troubleshoot Black Friday and Cyber Monday sending now that the easy red, yellow, or green check is gone.
Gmail’s Postmaster Tools moved from v1 to v2 this year, and senders felt it first as the color-coded reputation score disappearing. That single red, yellow, or green rating was the fastest way to check in on a program, so losing it still stings.
What Gmail removed was the quick view, not the reputation data. Complaint rate, spam rate, authentication status, and delivery signals are all still there, alongside two newer views, Compliance Status and a deliverability analysis tool, that explain what’s wrong instead of just scoring it.
Users can’t complain on messages that are not making it to the inbox. So don’t always assume that because your spam rate is low, everything is fine.
How do you set deliverability baselines before peak sending?
Peak volume makes every chart look strange, which is why Alison Gootee says baselines have to come from your own program, not a universal number.
Know your own sending goals
A marketing send, a transactional receipt, and a developer notification don’t share a baseline. Decide what you want from the season before you send to the whole database; treating every message like a marketing blast turns a customer into an unsubscribe.
Segment baselines by engagement cohort
Split your list by how recently each group engaged (three, six, ten-plus months) and watch each cohort’s trend separately, since reactivated contacts can tank an aggregate number while engaged subscribers perform as expected. Watch your complaint baseline, too: Gmail under-reports complaints and never names complainers, so a “recent engagers” list can still include people who already marked you as spam.
Watch for bot and list abuse
Signup abuse rises with sending volume. Protect your forms and check new signups for the low-quality addresses bots like to plant; a healthy list is a baseline input, not an afterthought. For more on cleaning up before the rush, see Black Friday and Cyber Monday: 5 tips to land in the inbox.
Pro top: For a deeper walkthrough of what changed with Google Postmaster Tools, check out our blog with Alison Gootee.
Three Black Friday scenarios, and how to read them
The panel walked through three situations senders hit every year, and how to tell a real problem from noise.
Volume rises, Gmail performance falls
Before blaming Gmail, check what changed on your side: frequency, signup-flow promises, and a subscriber’s full inbox experience this week. Change one variable at a time so you can tell which one moved the needle, and let your SMTP and bounce logs be the evidence.
Postmaster looks fine, but results don’t
A low spam rate isn’t proof your mail is wanted; mail stuck in spam can’t generate a complaint, so a quiet rate can still hide a filtering problem. Don’t wait on a Gmail support ticket. Watch your own signals, lean on your ESP for a cross-provider view, and treat 0.1% spam complaints as the point to start paying attention, not just the official 0.3% danger line. Transactional mail isn’t exempt, either: a legal unsubscribe exemption doesn’t stop a recipient from reporting you as spam.
Leadership wants a fix before tomorrow’s send
Swapping in a new IP or domain mid-campaign doesn’t erase a reputation problem. Mailbox providers read your whole sending fingerprint, not just one domain, so the same traffic appearing on a new domain overnight reads as evasion, not a fresh start.
The fastest way to make a deliverability problem harder to diagnose is to change your infrastructure in the middle of it.
One sender switched domains mid-season anyway and spent six months rebuilding the reputation it walked away from. Log every change instead, test the smallest safe adjustment, and give leadership evidence instead of a new domain.
When should you hold, continue, or narrow your sending?
Define your risk thresholds before peak season hits, not during it: decide in advance what complaint rate or conversion drop means “stop.”
Continue applies to variation you already expected and planned for, like reaching a dormant segment, as long as it stays inside the range you defined ahead of time. Narrow means isolating a meaningful cohort, recent purchasers, app users, new signups, rather than isolating by provider; Gmail, Yahoo, and Microsoft already separate your traffic without any help from you. Hold the moment an SMTP response explicitly flags your domain or IP for spam, since that’s not a signal to interpret, it’s a rejection to act on.
Wrapping up: What should you keep once peak season ends?
Once volume drops and Gmail performance recovers, reverse temporary changes one at a time so you can see which one mattered. Pull frequency back down for one-and-done seasonal purchases; nobody needs a daily reminder about the cup they bought in December.
Keep and nurture any previously dormant segment that engaged well, but route them through a preference center rather than straight back into full volume. Save this season’s evidence, what you changed and when, as next year’s baseline instead of waiting for a score that isn’t coming back.
The same logic applies if you’re tempted to fix a reputation problem with a new subdomain: reputation is a fingerprint across your IPs, domains, and branding, not one piece you can swap out. As Alison Gootee put it, “Gmail would rather see you improve and make a sustained improvement than have to assess a brand-new subdomain and figure out: are you the same person who was giving us trouble before?”
