Misidentified Spam in barrington220.org Email from Yahoo and Hotmail

As you have likely noticed, our barrington220.org email system uses Google's Gmail system as our district's email provider for both staff and student (bsd220.org) email. For the past several months, the tech team has heard about situations where email senders with addresses from domains such as yahoo.com and hotmail.com are sent automatically to Google's Spam folder. 

This is an issue with all Gmail—not just Barrington 220’s Gmail. The IT language for this phenomenon is “Domain Reputation,” and apparently Google has determined that Yahoo, Hotmail—and many other email domains–have a Bad (or Low) Domain Reputation.

Google specifically defines and ranks Domain Reputation on a scale that spans Bad, Low, Medium/Fair, to High. Google states that email from a domain with a Bad Domain Reputation is one that has a "history of sending an enormously high volume of spam. Mail coming from this entity will almost always be rejected at SMTP or marked as spam." Likewise, email from a Low Domain Reputation will "likely be marked as spam."

For us as users of a Google-based email system, this means that we should occasionally look through our Spam folder to see if any legitimate email senders have been flagged as Spam. If so, we can do two things: 

• Mark the email as “Not Spam” 
• Add the email address to your Contacts

These actions will prevent further issues with this address. 

Source: Gmail Postmaster Tools