The essential Danny Sullivan takes a look at what kinds of emails Gmail’s new inbox is disadvantaging.

For the non-Gmail users among you: Google recently split what had been one inbox into five: Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, and Forums. The idea is your random Facebook notifications should end up in social, quasi-spam from your Banana Republic should end up in Promotions, and the like. It’s an interesting idea, but some preliminary data seems to show that emails shuffled out of Primary end up getting read less.

And that’s an issue for news organizations, for whom email newsletters and breaking news alerts can be an important vector for traffic — and whose emails are often ending up in Promotions or Updates these days.

Mailchimp also had a post on this, and asked the important question:

A lot of people have asked how they can get their email delivered to the Primary tab. In response, I’ve heard several suggestions claiming to have found a solution, but none of those panned out.

I’ve tested something like fifty configurations of headers, content, and authentication and I’ve come to one conclusion. The best way to get into the Primary tab is to have your subscribers put you there.

Unfortunately, making that ask isn’t as easy as one might like.