When sending a Mailchimp campaign, with your email address as one of the recipients, your campaign may appear in your junk email folder. In Gmail, you may even receive a warning that the email message may have been sent from someone purporting to be you (i.e. spoofing).
Below I discuss how to avoid this warning in Gmail.
Be Careful with this message
This may be a spoofed message. The message claims to have been sent from your account, but Gmail couldn’t verify the actual source. Avoid clicking links or replying with sensitive information, unless you are sure you actually sent this message. (No need to reset your password, the real sender does not actually have access to your account!)
Why the spoof Gmail warning appears
It is quite scary to receive the warning in Gmail however don’t be concerned if you know that you sent an email campaign from Mailchimp to yourself and this warning message appears.
From the perspective of Gmail it looks suspicious that you are sending yourself an email form a non-Gmail server.
How to resolve the Gmail spoofing warning
Solving this issue is simple. All you need do is authenticate your sending domain within Mailchimp. I’ve previously provided these instructions.
Once you’ve authenticated your domain, Gmail is able to identify that you use Mailchimp to send your email campaigns. The spoof warnings will stop showing and your campaigns will also stop going straight to the junk folder.
Hello Gary,
A client of mine continues to get the spoof Gmail warning even after their email address is authenticated.
When I send out the emails, the from field has the email address that is authenticated.
What else needs to be done so this is not happen anymore?
Any guidance would be greatly appreciated! ~ Salma
Hi Salma, Are you certain that the SPF and DKIM records are correctly on the sending domain (Mailchimp have instructions at https://mailchimp.com/help/set-up-custom-domain-authentication-dkim-and-spf/)? It’s very unlikely that the Gmail spoofing message will appear if the records have been added to the sending domain.