I totally screwed up with Gmail

[Nat]

About two months ago I got enough time to start building and making money online. After about a month of brainstorming ideas, realizing my ideas were bad, and continuing to try and figure out what I should do the real world got pretty real and I needed some money. I knew I was skilled enough at making/hosting websites for low-middle end clients and I also have some white label software/packages I can pretty easily set up and sell, so I started grinding on this because hosting sites at a 5-20x markup is stable cashflow and developing simple sites isn't hard. I bought a domain name and I also registered the company_emd@gmail. I'm not technically knowledgeable about email, my emails from a shared server are limited and they aren't inboxing, and I needed to start sending emails ASAP. So I forwarded anything sent to @mydomain to the @gmail and went from there. I stay away from anything grey-black hat SEO and if Google wants to spy on me there really isn't anything to see.

I've only got a really small portfolio of site, I'm super young, and I can't compete with certain niches of web development market. I knew my niche -- people with really crummy websites, people who still hadn't gotten websites because they were too technically behind to know how to Google, and people who were too busy/unmotivated to take any action. There have been several days that I've spent hours researching local businesses / individuals who have existing websites that are outdated and sending them a quick email. Not to mention cold calling / emailing places for website related stuff.

I have never hit the daily server send limit on this Gmail account, but I have sent out a solid number of emails on 3-4 different days. This morning Google suspended and locked the email... It really didn't cross my mind that this 'activity' would get me suspended, without reaching send limits, especially because I know people who do 'outreach' with Gmail accounts which is pretty similar. I guess enough people marked me as spam? Any email sent to the address returns an un-deliverable message with a link to 'Disabled User.' -- that's gonna look really great when potential clients email me.

I contacted Google about it, but I'm not sure if they'll even respond... much less within the next day or two. This really blows because I'm expecting several people to contact me at that address and I have quite a lot of email records stored there.

 

[CCarter]

Wait you didn't store your contact ALL within Gmail did you? You have copies of the email addresses you reached out to somewhere else right?

I'm assuming you took my advice of never relying on a 3rd party system for storing and maintaining your infrastructure right? Like not using mailchimp or other email newsletter subscriptions to collect and store your newsletter members without a backup copy right.

If not you fucked up, and take it as a life lesson cause 3rd party systems WILL LOCK YOU OUT and you will NOT be able to get back into the system and can lose your whole membership base cause of shit like this.

When you have a newsletter list for example, save the members in a database on your servers then use the 3rd party's APIs to update the subscription - otherwise you've put your whole life in other people's hands and will have to abide by their TOS. You guys HAVE to take those extra steps cause it's your business's lifeblood on the line. But it's one of those things you have to have happen to you to sort of realize the potential problems - cause it's happened to me.

In this emailing/outreach situation - it's a tough one, cause #1 I wouldn't have used gmail, but forget that. You could have auto BCCed outgoing emails to an offsite server, or at the very least have a spreadsheet (or lead management system) of all your outreach so you know who is at what places in your outreaching funnel/process.

You can probably get a DigitalOcean droplet or whatever and put your domain on there and get your email at @mydomain setup and play it off like "oh yeah I changed emails to look more professional" or something - I dunno, its a difficult one.

 

[Nat]

Wait you didn't store your contact ALL within Gmail did you? You have copies of the email addresses you reached out to somewhere else right?

I'm assuming you took my advice of never relying on a 3rd party system for storing and maintaining your infrastructure right? Like not using mailchimp or other email newsletter subscriptions to collect and store your newsletter members without a backup copy right.

If not you fucked up, and take it as a life lesson cause 3rd party systems WILL LOCK YOU OUT and you will NOT be able to get back into the system and can lose your whole membership base cause of shit like this.

When you have a newsletter list for example, save the members in a database on your servers then use the 3rd party's APIs to update the subscription - otherwise you've put your whole life in other people's hands and will have to abide by their TOS. You guys HAVE to take those extra steps cause it's your business's lifeblood on the line. But it's one of those things you have to have happen to you to sort of realize the potential problems - cause it's happened to me.

In this emailing/outreach situation - it's a tough one, cause #1 I wouldn't have used gmail, but forget that. You could have auto BCCed outgoing emails to an offsite server, or at the very least have a spreadsheet (or lead management system) of all your outreach so you know who is at what places in your outreaching funnel/process.

You can probably get a DigitalOcean droplet or whatever and put your domain on there and get your email at @mydomain setup and play it off like "oh yeah I changed emails to look more professional" or something - I dunno, its a difficult one.

Its a life lesson for sure, and I'm glad I had it enforced after 2 months of hard work vs 1 year or 2 years. I just really wasn't expecting it in this case -- unlike other 'deletion' experiences I've had with websites/photos/documents. I have copies of the few emails that really matter and I've already emailed them. But, I was hoping for people to be responding back to emails at that address from several weeks of outreach. And if they do, I'll never know now. I also had some physical cards and handouts with that email on it. Fuck me, but I've learned my lesson. The majority of that account's data was "No thank you," sent msg with no response, or message un-deliverables. From now on though, I'm going to be seriously backing all of my stuff up. You've never given bad advice yet, and moving forward I'm going to be way more aware of how I store information.

Edit: Oh, and my outreach approach was not very organized. I made local notes of which keywords and search phrases I had already used to research/find websites, but I didn't make a list of emails or anything... mostly because of how largely unsuccessful my direct contacting attempts have been. And also because each phrase/keyword/research that I did I tried to literally not stop until I had found everything potentially useful. Instead of picking up where I left off I just stayed up all night until I'd finished the Google results page that contained a specific footer text.

 

[MooFace]

Bad luck - it's a painful yet very effective way of learning about these things

A few years from now, I guarantee you'll be telling stories of screwups over a beer, and you'll get to enjoy sounding wise!

(says me - whole roman legions of such mistakes behind me... and growing)

 

[miketpowell]

You're exactly right that learning these lessons now is more important than later. 3rd party companies will screw you and not think twice about it, you always need a back up.

In your particular case I imagine your outreach just came across to negatively to your target market and your spam complaint was way to high. Because I certainly know of plenty of people that scrap emails and mail them from gmail or wherever without to much trouble if they stay targeted.

Lastly I don't know much about email spamming but maybe it was also the lack of an "unsubscribe" link. There is nothing wrong with sending emails to people you don't know but I believe you are required to include a link for them to click so you never email them again as well as your business name/address if you are soliciting them. So it *might* be the lack of that if you didn't have it as well.

 

[Nat]

HOLY RELIEF, my social engineering skills payed off and my account was reinstated -- just kidding, what I wrote to Gmail was probably way less important than the fact I had only 'minorly' been violating the TOS. The email rejected incoming emails for over a day, but at least I have control over it now. But I've seriously learned my lesson, I'm not going to be allowing any external party to have control over my data, email, etc. I'll keep checking this address for people responding to stuff I sent out, but from now on I'll be using my own domain. Just gotta work on inboxing. That's seriously the only reason I used gmail was because personally I thought the better inboxing/priorty delivery rate was more important than the 'less professional look' of an @gmail vs @company.

You're exactly right that learning these lessons now is more important than later. 3rd party companies will screw you and not think twice about it, you always need a back up.

You're absolutely right. Been making backups of all my email addresses yesterday and today -- they're all personal but I'm so paranoid now. I've also been trying to figure out anything else I use that is outside of my control.

In your particular case I imagine your outreach just came across to negatively to your target market and your spam complaint was way to high. Because I certainly know of plenty of people that scrap emails and mail them from gmail or wherever without to much trouble if they stay targeted.

I think you are absolutely right. A lot of the same message or with minor changes. Definitely got marked as spam some of the time. Probably helped that I was manually sending all of them and not sending anything near the daily send max.

Lastly I don't know much about email spamming but maybe it was also the lack of an "unsubscribe" link. There is nothing wrong with sending emails to people you don't know but I believe you are required to include a link for them to click so you never email them again as well as your business name/address if you are soliciting them. So it *might* be the lack of that if you didn't have it as well.

Ooo, that's super interesting. I need to look more into this. I wonder how you implement this when you aren't using a list and you're not even a 'real' company