New Deliverability Requirements for 2024

Google and Yahoo have announced new guidelines for high volume email senders. The changes are merely enforcing existing best practices, but do check the configuration of your marketing automation platform.

Getting marketing emails into the inbox has always been difficult. Marketers are collateral damage in the ongoing battle between email providers and ever increasing volumes of spam. Each year, additional deliverability protections are introduced for legitimate bulk email senders to differentiate them from spammers.

In 2024, those guidelines required to get emails delivered will get stricter. Google and Yahoo recently announced updated deliverability guidelines for anyone sending emails to mailboxes hosted on their platforms. As part of this, companies sending more than 5,000 emails per day will have much stronger guidelines to follow than other senders.

The new email deliverability guidelines cover both B2B and B2C marketers, as they affect anyone sending to business email hosted by Google Workspace, as well as consumers with Gmail or Yahoo email accounts. The aim is to guard against spoofing, which is the common spammer tactic of sending emails in the name of your boss or another senior executive at your employer.

Server Configuration

Firstly, Google and Yahoo will now require a best practice DNS setup for anyone sending email. Any form of server misconfiguration will see emails marked as spam. There are 3 parts to this, which most marketing automation platforms already enforce anyway. The following are now required for all servers:

• An SPF record listing the IP address or server used to send emails
• DKIM authentication is configured for all domains used to send emails
• The IP address used to send emails has a valid reverse DNS record configured

Do check with your IT department that all relevant DNS records have been created for any domain used to send marketing emails. Your marketing automation platform will provide guidance around the exact DNS records that need to be configured for any domain used to send marketing emails.

Spam Complaints

Secondly, Google have now published a benchmark for spam complaints. Inbox providers have always closely monitored the number of spam complaints received, but the exact thresholds they use have never been published until now. Google will require that the spam rate be kept below 0.3%, and recommend that marketers keep this below 0.1%. This is based on the number of people marking the email as spam in the email client. It isn't measured by marketing automation providers, but can be tracked using Google Postmaster Tools or Sender Score.

Thirdly, Google and Yahoo are now enforcing a DMARC quarantine policy with stricter requirements for high-volume senders. They will start blocking impersonated email addresses. To comply, marketers will need to stop using their corporate email domain (e.g. example.com) in the from address of their email campaigns, and instead send emails from the email domain configured in their marketing automation platform (e.g. marketing.example.com). This is already best practice but has never been enforced previously.

List Unsubscribe

Finally, Google will now require a one-click unsubscribe link to be included in all marketing messages sent by high-volume senders. This is used by the list unsubscribe message displayed above the email in Gmail. Most marketing automation providers already add the necessary email headers to any emails deployed through their platform, but it does require a valid unsubscribe link to be included in the footer of every email. As such, always test the unsubscribe link in every campaign before hitting the send button. Failure to do so will now have an impact on future email deliverability.

Email providers need to be confident that you won't send spam to their customers. Deliverability has always been about reputation and server configuration rather than content. It's the history of your marketing automation platform, as well as the history of your from address that determines whether marketing emails reach the inbox. Now, the more emails you send, the stricter the guidelines you will need to follow.