Survey says: What was your biggest BFCM inbox challenge?
Time to look back on the 2025 holiday marketing season. Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is always a challenging time for email senders AND receivers. Email marketers are digging deeper into their email database than other times of year, and often are increasing their send cadence, too. More sends, more recipients, more revenue (they hope). And thanks to that beefed up marketing calendar, mailbox providers are dealing with a significantly heightened volume of inbound mail, and that brings its own challenges. More stress on the infrastructure. More work for the spam filters. Meaning there’s more going on, more to manage, more to deal with.
This year brought some new, additional challenges. Specifically:
Microsoft implementing enhanced sender requirements (announced April, enforced in May), and
Google started to ramp up enforcement of enhanced sender requirements in November.
So, that got me thinking. Of the two, which did email senders have greater trouble with? Where did they experience more blocking? (Fair or unfair; I’m not really attempting to make a distinction. I’m not really able to tell from where I sit.)
So, I put a little survey out there on Linkedin, and here’s what I found. Microsoft led the way, with 70% of the fifty-six survey respondents indicating that most of their deliverability woes were Microsoft-related this time around. Google’s Gmail was second, with 21%. Hardly scientific, but interesting nonetheless; folks shared, by a wide margin, that Microsoft was their biggest source of inbox pain.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if Google’s enhanced enforcement of sender requirements had been on the board for a bit longer, then Gmail might have ranked higher. I know that Google started rejecting a bunch more non-compliant mail just before BFCM; I wonder if email senders actually fully picked up on this wherever it was happening.
What say you, fellow email senders? Which mailbox provider caused you the most pain through the past quarter or so?
Time to look back on the 2025 holiday marketing season. Black Friday/Cyber Monday (BFCM) is always a challenging time for email senders AND receivers. Email marketers are digging deeper into their email database than other times of year, and often are increasing their send cadence, too. More sends, more recipients, more revenue (they hope). And thanks to that beefed up marketing calendar, mailbox providers are dealing with a significantly heightened volume of inbound mail, and that brings its own challenges. More stress on the infrastructure. More work for the spam filters. Meaning there’s more going on, more to manage, more to deal with.
This year brought some new, additional challenges. Specifically:
- Microsoft implementing enhanced sender requirements (announced April, enforced in May), and
- Google started to ramp up enforcement of enhanced sender requirements in November.
So, that got me thinking. Of the two, which did email senders have greater trouble with? Where did they experience more blocking? (Fair or unfair; I’m not really attempting to make a distinction. I’m not really able to tell from where I sit.)So, I put a little survey out there on Linkedin, and here’s what I found. Microsoft led the way, with 70% of the fifty-six survey respondents indicating that most of their deliverability woes were Microsoft-related this time around. Google’s Gmail was second, with 21%. Hardly scientific, but interesting nonetheless; folks shared, by a wide margin, that Microsoft was their biggest source of inbox pain.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that if Google’s enhanced enforcement of sender requirements had been on the board for a bit longer, then Gmail might have ranked higher. I know that Google started rejecting a bunch more non-compliant mail just before BFCM; I wonder if email senders actually fully picked up on this wherever it was happening.
What say you, fellow email senders? Which mailbox provider caused you the most pain through the past quarter or so?
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