On October 3, 2023, Gmail and Yahoo announced new requirements for companies that deliver emails to their users. Each platform is turning what was once considered best practices for bulk email sending into mandatory requirements.
Senders who aren’t in compliance with the new requirements risk having major email deliverability issues from early 2024. This guide summarizes the changes, why they are happening, and how you can best prepare for them.
Authenticating emails has always been a best practice recommendation for those who send in bulk. Despite this, many senders either knowingly, or unknowingly, bypass crucial steps. As a result, it’s become increasingly harder for Google and Yahoo to protect their users’ inbox from spam or phishing email attacks. That’s why they have decided that proper email authentication and deliverability practices are no longer a “nice-to-have”, but are now compulsory.
According to Gmail and Yahoo, bulk senders who want to ensure their emails continue to hit recipients’ inboxes have to comply with the following:
Note: Yahoo hasn’t yet specified a spam complaint threshold
Gmail plans to implement its changes as of February 1, 2024, with Yahoo following during “the first quarter in 2024”. It’s expected that both will implement a gradual roll out, allowing for adjustments based on industry feedback.
The new requirements primarily target high-volume bulk senders, which Google defines as those who send over 5,000 emails a day. Despite this, smaller volume senders still have to comply with most rules, and it’s in their best interest to comply with all.
The good news is, whilst the new rules may sound daunting, they aren’t necessarily hard to implement and abide by. Better yet, if you are an Audience Republic user, we’re implementing a number of platform improvements in early January 2024 that will guide you through it. These improvements are detailed below.
First, you’ll want to get an idea of what domains you use for email sending and whether they are already authenticated. Audience Republic users will be able to see whether their domains are authenticated under the ‘Domain’ tab within their ‘Account Settings’.
This step is particularly important for users that are sending from a free email domain (e.g. yourevent@gmail.com) because you can’t authenticate a domain you don’t own. To comply with the new rules, these users will instead need to purchase and authenticate their own domain (e.g. @yourevent.com).
For any domains that require verification, please follow the simple steps within the Audience Republic platform. This setup will require you (or whoever manages your domain) to add some CNAME and TXT records to your DNS. Once these steps are complete, the DKIM, SPF and DMARC records will be in compliance with Gmail’s and Yahoo’s new requirements.
As an additional layer of protection for email senders, from January 2024, Audience Republic will prevent email sends from accounts that are using free domains such as @gmail.com. Once you have purchased a domain, follow the steps listed above to ensure a compliant set up.
Gmail and Yahoo believe recipients shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to unsubscribe from email lists. At Audience Republic, we agree! That’s why we mandate clearly visible unsubscribe links in all emails.
From January 2024, we’re also planning an update to marketing email headers (aka ‘list-unsubscribe’ headers) to meet the new Gmail and Yahoo standard, further protecting our senders’ reputation.
Good news! This comes out-of-the-box with Audience Republic. Unsubscribes will be auto unsubscribed from your list.
The new policies include a spam rate threshold for bulk senders. Specifically, Google is mandating the spam rate must be kept below 0.3%. We recommend all users register their domain with a dedicated service to monitor their spam rate. Google Postmaster Tools is free (and quick) to set up.
Other helpful tips to prevent your emails being marked as spam:
For further information, please head to the Audience Republic support section, or contact our team directly. We’ll be sending more information on the changes to our platform in due course.
