New Gmail Spam Message: “Images in this message are hidden, this message might be suspicious or spam”

Based on user reports, chatting amongst other ESP friends, and our own investigations it appears that Gmail has introduced a new spam notice.

This notice hides images in emails and displays a warning message stating, "Images in this message are hidden, this message might be suspicious or spam." This change has been observed to impact email open rates significantly, as users can not trigger the open pixel found at the bottom of emails.

Interestingly, images still are sent to the inbox/promotions/updates.

If you find that your users are seeing this spam notice in your emails then we recommend you work on cleaning up your list, sending slower, and focus on rebuilding your reputation with inbox providers.

We personally believe they're using this as a mechanism to alert senders (via them seeing a decline in opens) that they are spamming and should take action before Gmail starts pushing them into the spam folder in future sends.

If you are a Bento customer seeing this let us know and we can give you advise on how to manage this. If you are not a Bento customer we recommend opening a ticket with your email provider.