Return Path's Christine Borgia writes, "We have confirmed with both Gmail and Hotmail that they made recent updates to their filters." We're not seeing anything too widespread here at ExactTarget, but there have been a few instances where a client's mail may be going to the bulk folder at either ISP now, but it wasn't before.
What's the fix? The ISPs don't ever tell us exactly what they've changed, so we can't tell you EXACTLY what to do to fix it. But what we can tell you is that ISPs are looking closer and closer at senders, trying to find ones who don't follow permission best practices or who don't pay attention to subscriber engagement, life cycle management, etc.
If you're one of the ones affected, I'd start looking at your subscriber engagement. It may be time to reconfirm or discard subscribers who haven't opened or clicked in many months. Pull back to mailing only subscribers who are opening and clicking, and stick to that for a few weeks. If problems begin to clear up, that's a clear indicator that engagement is the issue.
Hopefully you weren't using co-reg or email append. If you were/are, then Hotmail and Gmail just figured that out. It is time to move away from these non-permission based practices. (And don't listen to the append vendors who try to tell you that email append is awesome. Truth be told, all of the biggest, most difficult client issues I've dealt with turned out to be driven by email append.)
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