Hi everyone! Here's a summary of what happened during Gmail's recent outage and what ConvertKit has done to remedy the impact.
What happened
On December 14th and December 15th, Gmail experienced intermittent outages. During this time, Gmail incorrectly bounced messages to valid subscribers with the reason "this email address does not exist".
How this might have impacted you
When messages bounce as invalid, ConvertKit protects your reputation and deliverability by making these subscribers inactive within your account. This ensures that you don't continue to send mail to addresses that don't exist, which would harm your sender reputation. This means, if you sent an email to Gmail users during the time of the Gmail outage, there's a chance the emails bounced and the subscribers were marked as "bounced" within your ConvertKit account.
Please note that this outage will not have a negative impact on your sender reputation. While high bounce rates can cause reputation issues, this event will not because the issue was on Gmail's side.
How ConvertKit remedied the outage impact
Since Gmail incorrectly bounced subscribers that have real, valid email addresses, we have taken the following steps to ensure you can reach those subscribers:
- We have re-activated all subscribers that Gmail incorrectly bounced.
- We have re-sent all emails that were incorrectly bounced at the time of the outage.
If you have any follow up questions about the Gmail outage and how your emails were impacted, please reach out to our support team at help@convertkit.com.