Gmail issues with our Mailing List

Since July 18th it appears that Gmail has been flagging our MailChimp mailing list emails as ‘Suspicious’. I want to thank the few of you that have brought this to my attention! I’ve been working hard on how to address this, but it appears that this might be a large change that Gmail may have pushed out, since it’s affecting many blogs (that are noticing the same problem). Check out this link, that Graham Cluley posted on July 27th.

Now this is a guitar effects related blog, so I don’t want to get too computer tech here, but I know some of you are in the tech world, and may be able to offer some suggestions or advice. What I’ve done so far:

– Changed the ‘from’ email address on the mailing list email. I know this is a fix on the symptom, and probably will have no impact on the big picture.
– I contacted MailChimp and the reviewed the RSS and saw no issues. They recommended the email change. I also ran test for quality via their tools, and all checked out in the green.
– I wanted to go deeper, and I think I might be getting close the actual problem. I think Gmail might be thinking it’s suspicious since the ‘from’ email says it’s from effectsbay.com, but the sending server is a MailChimp mail delivery server. Doing some digging, I verified my domain with MailChimp and updated DNS with a SPF record saying that MailChimp does have the right to send on behalf of the effectsbay.com domain.

Now, these changes were made 2 days ago, and users are still not receiving email. I’m struggling to find a way to contact Google/Gmail directly to get to the heart of the problem, so if any of you can help in this area, please do. I created this forum post, but not responses as of yet.

I know a lot of you that subscribe to the site use Gmail, and I don’t want you to miss out on the next give away coming up, and/or any deal/news about pedals. For a work around, for now, follow these steps:

– Click the ‘Ignore, I trust this message’ link in the alert.
– I also see references to moving the message back to the inbox and adding the email as a ‘contact’

I’m still trying to contact Gmail about the problem.. and I’m continuing to do some more research to see if there is anything I can do on my end to address this. Thanks for your patience, and appreciate any help you can provide.

Thanks!