HACKER Q&A
📣 chistev

Why are my newsletters going to Promotions?


I run a very small blog with an opt-in email newsletter. All the usual email hygiene is in place (SPF/DKIM/DMARC and double opt-in).

Transactional emails (confirm subscription) reliably land in Gmail’s Primary tab. Actual newsletter emails (new post notifications) almost always land in Promotions.

The issue is that some subscribers don’t open Promotions at all, so engagement drops even though deliverability is technically fine.

Is this essentially “by design” on Gmail’s side, or are there structural changes that materially affect tab placement?

Is the only realistic mitigation educating users to move the email to Primary?

  👤 Nextgrid Accepted Answer ✓
That sounds like the system working as intended - the newsletter is there to promote your blog, your product, whatever - the point is it's not 1-to-1 human-to-human email, so flagging it as promotion is appropriate.

(it's likely using the fact many GMail users are receiving the same email to determine this is bulk e-mail and likely a promotion; there's not much you can do about it short of writing a manual email to every single user)