How does Mail.ru handle engagement scoring?
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You're sending to Russian recipients and wondering if Mail.ru filters the same way Gmail and Outlook do. The answer is both yes and no. Mail.ru's engagement scoring follows similar principles (good engagement builds trust, bad engagement hurts you), but the specifics are tuned to Russian users and spam patterns.
The fundamental difference. Mail.ru serves millions of Russian speakers. Russian spam patterns, language characteristics, and user behavior differ from Western markets. Mail.ru has spent years tuning their filters to catch Russian-language spam and scams that Gmail's Western-optimized algorithms might miss. That means their engagement weighting might be different. A click-to-open ratio that's perfect at Gmail might be mediocre at Mail.ru. Unsubscribe rates might be interpreted differently.
What Mail.ru likely cares about. Similar to Western providers, Mail.ru tracks opens, clicks, deletions, and complaint rates. But because their user base has different engagement habits (different reading patterns, different unsubscribe behavior), the thresholds probably differ. Russian users might delete or archive emails differently than American users. Mail.ru's algorithm has learned to interpret those patterns.
What you actually can't know." Mail.ru doesn't publicly document their engagement algorithm the way (some) Western providers do. You can't look at documentation and say "here are the exact weights." So you have to monitor separately. Track your Mail.ru performance independently from Gmail and Outlook. If your Mail.ru open rates are consistently lower even with the same content, it doesn't necessarily mean you're being filtered. It might just be that Russian users engage differently.
Your practical strategy. Stick to fundamentals everywhere: clean authentication, good list quality, relevant content. Then monitor Mail.ru separately. Set up tracking in your ESP specifically for Mail.ru domain performance. If open rates are low but bounce rates are normal and complaints are clean, you're probably in the inbox. (Mail.ru is only about 3 percent of global email, so unless you specifically target Russian recipients, it might not be worth deep optimization.)
Start with engagement signals fundamentals. Then read about international filtering differences to understand the broader context.
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