As we all know, the decisions made by big technology companies affect everyone's habits. And as a company, often all we can do is adapt and look for the best possible solutions. That is exactly what we did in response to a change you may have noticed over the past few months.
What happened
Google — and with it most major email providers — tightened the rules for sending email. When many messages are sent in a short time, those platforms read it as a suspicious signal and start to penalize: messages land in the spam folder and bounces increase. Bounces are emails that go out and come back without reaching their destination: they go back and forth, pile up and create work, but never fulfill their purpose, which is to reach the person. All of this damages sender reputation and, with it, the likelihood that emails reach the inbox.
Our old habit of sending a news item or a follow-up notice and having it reach everyone automatically, instantly, was no longer viable as we knew it.
What we did
Instead of waiting for the problem to constrain us, we took the matter into our own hands and built our own solution, from scratch, that works on two fronts:
⚙️Queuing and regulating sends
The system manages how many emails go out per unit of time, so that Google does not read the activity as abuse. Emails go out in a staggered way, protecting sender reputation.
✉️Allowing people to unsubscribe
Each person can opt out of the emails they do not want to receive. This is key: when someone does not want an email and has no way to stop receiving it, they mark it as spam, and every spam report hurts sender reputation. Offering a clear way to unsubscribe helps protect it. This option is already available in News and Forum notices, and we are working to extend it to follow-up notices and messaging (not everything is ready yet, but that is the direction).
What changes for you
The change of habit is simple, and the good news is that you now have a planning option to make sure every send succeeds: the scheduled follow-up notice. Instead of relying on immediate delivery, you can plan ahead when each communication goes out, giving the system the margin it needs for it to arrive on time.
The idea is to plan a little ahead. Depending on how many emails you need to send, it may be worth moving it forward by one or several days: the larger the send, the more margin it needs. For example:
💡If you need the communication to arrive on the 17th, schedule the send for the 16th, and state explicitly in the text that the event takes place on the 17th.
That way the system has room to release the emails in a regulated manner, and your audience gets the information on time and in the inbox, not in spam.
To support you through this change, we prepared a step-by-step manual (in Spanish): Communication manual.
How we prioritize sends
So that what matters does not sit waiting, we put together a priority table. Some emails are urgent and go first, regardless of the queue; others can wait a little longer because their information remains available elsewhere. For example:
🔴High priority
Creating a user account or a password recovery request are urgent and go first.
🔵Low priority
A notice about participation in a forum can wait its turn, since it can also be seen in context inside the campus.
Like any categorization, it is somewhat arbitrary, but the underlying logic is simple: whatever is urgently needed should arrive as soon as possible. If you need to know it in detail, we can share the full priority table with you.
Some recommendations
There are small actions on your side that go a long way toward getting emails delivered and helping the system work better:
✅Review the registered email addresses
Check that they are spelled correctly and remove made-up addresses — such as borrar@borrar.com.ar — that some people enter because they do not want to receive email. Those addresses only generate bounces.
🎯Choose what to communicate by email
Decide whether email is the most suitable channel for each message and which communications you really want to send this way.
💬Add WhatsApp where appropriate
You can set a different WhatsApp number for each classroom, which allows for more direct contact. This depends on institutional policy and on the person in charge of the classroom. You can also include WhatsApp in the catalog.
In short
- Google changed the rules for bulk email sending.
- Unregulated sends lead to spam, bounces and penalties that affect sender reputation.
- We developed our own solution that queues and regulates sends and adds an unsubscribe option (already available in News and Forum notices; on its way for follow-up notices and messaging).
- The new way of working adds a planning option: scheduling follow-up notices in advance to make sure the send succeeds.
- Emails go out in a queue and according to a priority table: urgent ones (user creation, password recovery) go first.
We cannot change the decisions of big tech companies, but we can adapt and respond. That is what this development is about: keeping an effective email service and doing everything possible so that your important communications reach their destination.
educativa Team