Gmail and Yahoo have announced that, beginning in February of 2024, they will begin enforcing stricter authentication requirements on email senders. If you do not meet their requirements, your email might not be delivered as expected or may even be marked as spam.
Many of these new requirements are already part of our established deliverability best practices. Just the same, take the next few months to review and update your practices where needed. Below is a checklist you can follow to make sure you are in compliance. And if you’re new to the world of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC, don’t worry. While it sounds a little confusing, you’ll get it pretty quickly.
Requirements built into Targeted Email
First, here are a few requirements that we have taken care of for you:
- One-click unsubscribe
We automatically inject Gmail’s preferred ‘list-unsubscribe’ method into the emails you send, allowing Gmail to offer an unsubscribe button at the top of the email. Also, your unsubscribe page does not require login or even typing of the email address. Users just click a button and the email is unsubscribed.
- Emails are sent in RFC 5322
- Our sending domains and IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records (also referred to as PTR)
Gmail/Yahoo Authentication Requirements
Here are Gmail and Yahoo’s requirements you want to be sure to meet before February 2024:
- SPF and DKIM records for your sending domain - These records are created in the service that hosts your domain’s DNS record (Cloudflare, Godaddy, etc.). We cannot do this for you, but we have help documentation to guide you. You can verify that your SPF and DKIM are setup to work with Targeted Email by using the validation tool in the Targeted Email settings area.
- A DMARC record for your sending domain - Only required if you send greater than 5,000 pieces of email a day. This is also an action you’ll need to take with your domain’s DNS host - and again, we have documentation to help.
- Keep SPAM rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3% - Postmaster Tools is a free service from Gmail. It reports on SPAM rates associated to your sending domain. Gmail, unlike some other tools, does not inform us when a receiver clicks the Report SPAM. To monitor we encourage you to signup for Postmaster Tools. You should also be keeping an eye on your SPAM rates in Targeted Email.
- Do not use any sending domain that your organization does not own (e.g. gmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com, hotmail.com) in your From Address when sending email out of Targeted Email or Online Actions - Gmail and Yahoo will identify this email as SPAM and quarantine it (send it to a SPAM folder).