Landing in the Inbox
Before anyone reads your email, Gmail, Outlook and the others decide what to do with it. There are really two decisions behind that, and they do not follow the same rules.
The first one is inbox or spam. It rests mostly on the address your emails come from and on the opinion mailboxes have built about it over time. That opinion is called your sender reputation, and it grows month after month. What you write counts as well: a subject line that oversells, an email that is one big image with three lines of text, or a shortened link will all cost you. But a solid reputation forgives those mistakes, while a damaged one sends even a perfectly written email to spam.
The second decision, on Gmail, is which tab. Primary or Promotions is settled almost entirely by the content and the shape of your email. Commercial wording, a promo code, a lot of images and buttons, and Gmail files it under Promotions. That is not a failure. Most newsletters live there, your subscribers know where to find them, and fighting to get out of that tab is rarely worth the trouble. Spam is the one that actually hurts you.
This page explains what TinyPages does for you, and the few things that are in your hands.
Send from your own domain
By default your emails leave from a TinyPages address, something like yourname@send.tinypages.co. It works perfectly and it is the right way to start: nothing to set up, and you can email your first contacts the day you sign up.
The limit appears as you grow. That address is shared with other TinyPages creators, so its reputation is shared too. Part of it is built by people you have no control over, and none of it belongs to you.
We strongly recommend connecting your own domain as soon as email becomes a real channel for your business: a list that keeps growing, a newsletter you send every week, a launch on the horizon. From that moment, the trust you build is attached to your own brand, your readers recognise the address, and everything you earn stays yours.
See Custom domain for the setup, which takes about ten minutes.
A new domain starts slowly, on purpose
A freshly connected address has no history at all. If it suddenly sends five thousand emails in twenty minutes, mailbox providers read that as the behaviour of a spammer and they start refusing your messages. This is by far the most common way a first campaign goes wrong.
TinyPages handles this for you. When you send to your whole list from a recent domain, your email goes out in small groups spread over time instead of leaving all at once. Everyone still receives it, it simply takes longer: on a domain connected a few days ago, a list of several thousand contacts can take a few hours to go out completely.
You have nothing to do while this happens. Your dashboard fills up progressively, and cancelling or sending again would only make things worse. As your domain accumulates a normal history of emails sent and opened, TinyPages speeds up on its own, without you changing a setting.
If your list is large and your domain is brand new, send your first emails to a smaller group, for example one tag, then widen over the following weeks. Reputation is built by regularity, not by one big send.
Gmail shows your address instead of your name
During the first days on a new domain, some recipients see contact@yourname.com in the sender field, where they should see your name. Your settings are fine and your name really is in the email.
This is a Gmail protection. Anyone can write any name in front of an email address, so when the address is new to Gmail and absent from the recipient's contacts, Gmail prefers to show the raw address, which cannot be faked. It goes back to normal on its own as you send, as people open and reply, and immediately for anyone who adds you to their contacts.
What helps the most
- Only email people who asked for it. Double opt-in confirms every new address and keeps fake ones out of your list.
- Send regularly. A newsletter every week is worth far more than three emails in a year, even if the total is the same.
- Clean your list. Contacts who have opened nothing in six months cost you reputation on every send.
- Keep an eye on your spam rate in Performance tracking. Above 0.1%, slow down and review who you are emailing before sending again.