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Reputation block at Gmail

Needs review

diag_441 · SendGrid · opened 14 min ago · cluster of 1,204 events

Confidence ⓘ
94%
Blast radius
2 rules
mail.acme.com · news.acme.com
Estimated recovery
~40 min
based on 12 similar past incidents

◈ Model reasoning

1 · What happened

At 09:24 UTC, Gmail MX servers began rejecting SendGrid traffic with 550 5.7.1 ("unusual rate of unsolicited mail"). Rejection share climbed from 0.3% to 41% within 12 minutes across 1,204 messages.

2 · Likely root cause

This morning's newsletter batch to news.acme.com included a purchased list segment (import imp_2291) with a 9.8% unknown-user rate — 16× baseline. Gmail appears to have throttled the sending IPs in response. This matches the signature of a reputation block, not a content filter.

3 · Proposed fix

Fail over rules mail.acme.com and news.acme.com to AWS SES (healthy, 99.4% delivered), suppress the 118 addresses that hard-bounced, and quarantine import imp_2291 from future batches. SendGrid circuit is already open — approval makes the failover explicit and starts IP warming guidance.

Sample evidence events

All 1,204 events →
MessageRecipient MXSMTP replyTime
msg_9f2c81gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com550 5.7.109:38:14
msg_66b2a1gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com550 5.7.109:37:48
msg_51c9d7gmail-smtp-in.l.google.com421 4.7.009:36:55

If approved, MailOps will…