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Recently, our colleagues at Litmus outlined some new email deliverability rules from Gmail and Yahoo. We know these updates have a direct impact on how we and our clients can communicate with their email subscribers, so we sat down with our Senior Email Developer, Tim Hart, and Senior Solutions Architect, Jeffrey Rudolf, to get their reactions and thoughts on these recent changes.
The Good
These updates should make it harder for SPAM senders to reach inboxes. And those SPAM senders should be identified quicker based on the new SPAM complaint rate. This is an important step in the right direction for all email subscribers everywhere!
The Bad
- These changes may affect some smaller shops on smaller ESPs using shared IP pools, or ones that don’t have the sender authentication capabilities.
- As of February 6, 2024, there is no avenue for remediation. Neither Google nor Yahoo listed specific instructions on how to contact them if you are marked as a SPAM sender. So while they have new restrictions, it appears the remediation process is still the same.
The Strict
- No more than three spam reports for every 1,000 messages! Doesn’t sound like a lot, but it can add up quickly on smaller subscriberships.
- Unsubscribes must be honored within just two days! Make sure your ESP settings are updated.
What You Can Do Right Now
- Verify that your ESP supports and implements one-click unsubscribe, more info on that topic can be found in The Email Marketers Guide to Using List-Unsubscribe – Litmus
- Check your domain setup to make sure their messages are passing DKIM, DMARC, and SPF. These can be checked using tools like MxToolbox (mxtoolbox.com), or by reviewing the email headers for messages sent to Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo addresses. In Gmail specifically, the header should clearly show whether the email is passing on those three domain security features. Trace an email with its full header – Gmail Help
- Make sure to monitor Google Postmaster Tools for your sending domain. This Google-provided dashboard provides great insight into how Google/Gmail is handling mail from a particular sender. If you aren’t familiar, get started here: Get started with Postmaster Tools – Google Workspace Admin Help
- Closely monitor the overall deliverability rate in your ESP, as well as domain-specific engagement rates (specifically for @yahoo and @gmail domains). A reduction in engagement for subscribers from either of those domains could be a red flag.
Everything Else You Need to Know
- Overall, most reputable ESPs will make it easy for legitimate senders to adhere to the updated rules.
- Unfortunately, we won’t know how quickly senders will be affected, nor how easy the remediation process will be for a few months.
- It could be a challenge for businesses to stay within the stricter complaint rules. Especially considering the 20-30% industry average annual list churn. So hopefully that leads to a quicker remediation process with Gmail and Yahoo.
- The guideline is for senders with 5,000+ daily sends, so these changes won’t affect small businesses very much.
How We Can Help
Our skilled team of digital marketing experts can handle enterprise-level email for clients across industries. But we also take a holistic approach to your marketing to foster a stronger relationship with your customers at all points of engagement. This includes SMS, push, paid media, customer data analysis, and more. See our recent case studies here.
