Email marketing is the lifeblood of many businesses, but they face the constant threat of SPAM and impersonation. In their constant pursuit to address these concerns, Gmail and Yahoo have recently announced new requirements for bulk senders. While these practices are generally recognized as best standards, these email clients are taking the lead by enforcing them as early as Q1 of 2024.
In this blog post, we'll break down these changes and ensure you stay compliant using Notificare.
1. Authentication
As described in this post from 2021, where we explained in detail how you can prevent email spoofing, you will now be required to do so, or risk your emails being considered SPAM. Bulk senders must authenticate their emails using established protocols, such as SPF, DKIM and DMARC. If you use Notificare and correctly configured this service, you most likely already have proper SPF and DKIM records in your DNS.
Now you will also need to tell the receiving end what to do with non-compliant messages. This is done via Domain-based Message Authentication Reporting and Conformance, or DMARC. This usually involves adding a record to your DNS as follows:
_dmarc.example.com TXT "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:postmaster@example.com;"Although we can guide you, this is something you need to configure yourself and if you are not familiar with DNS, we strongly recommend you to contact your DNS administrator.
2. One-Click Unsubscribe
Users shouldn't need to go through a lengthy and usually shady process to unsubscribe from your email messages. These email clients are now enforcing you to use the one-click unsubscribe, a standard available for some time and supported by Notificare.
To tackle this, we've recently changed the following option of our email composer, to be enabled by default:
We will also handle the deactivation of the user automatically for you, making sure that you are compliant with these email client's requirements, which require you to honor these requests within two days.
3. Stop SPAM
This goes without saying, but you should only send emails that users want. These email clients will start enforcing SPAM rates. Gmail in particular will require you to stay below 0.3%.
Because these email clients already measure user reported SPAM rates, it is more important than ever that you only send relevant and high quality content that users want to receive. You can refresh your memory about all you can do to prevent your email from being flagged as SPAM, take a look at this post.
Additionally, you should start monitoring your complaints rate, which is something we provide for your in our Delivery Errors area.
Get ready now!
As you can see, we can help you stay compliant but ultimately there are steps you must take to ensure you can still send bulk email messages to your Gmail and Yahoo users. We wouldn't be surprised if more and more email clients will take similar steps to help declutter users’ inboxes and fight SPAM, phishing and malware.
And as always, if you have any questions feel free to reach out to our Team.