New rules for bulk email senders from Google, Yahoo: What you need to know

How to be safe from the new email sending rules and limits.

Warning, this might get technical, but as usual, my job is to break things down and make them actionable for us local businesses.

What's coming?

This February, Google and Yahoo will begin enforcing new requirements for bulk email senders. The guidelines largely focus on three areas: authentication of outgoing emails, reported spam rates and the ability to easily unsubscribe from email lists.

Google defined bulk senders in an early-October announcement as “those who send more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses in one day,” which caught the attention of email marketers and business owners.

And if you are thinking this doesn't;t apply to you because you don't send 5000 email a day, let's make sure you are aware and talk to your email marketing service to make sure you are safe, remember, they probably send that many emails for all their customers combined, not just for you.

What are the email authentication requirements for bulk senders?

Here's the tech stuff. The two companies will require bulk email senders to use what Google calls “well-established best practices” to authenticate the sender. This will close loopholes that can be exploited by attackers, according to Google. 

When it comes to email authentication, three mechanisms work together:

• Sender Policy Framework (SPF) helps prevent domain spoofing by allowing senders to identify the email servers that are allowed to send emails from their domain.
• DomainKeys Identified Mail (DKIM) adds a digital signature to outgoing email, which verifies the message was sent by an authorized sender and wasn’t tampered with along the way. 
• Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting and Conformance (DMARC) helps domain owners specify which actions to take when an email fails authentication. It also enables reporting on email authentication results.

Google and Yahoo are requiring bulk senders to set up all three of these mechanisms by February 1st.

Again, you don't have to know the tech details of this, talk to your email marketing provider to make sure these requirements are met and your emails keep flowing.

What are the reported spam rates for bulk email senders?

Google says bulk senders must keep their reported spam rate (i.e., the percentage of outgoing messages reported as spam by recipients) in Google Postmaster Tools below 0.10% and “avoid ever reaching 0.30% or higher.”

Do you get reports from email marketing provider? What is your spam rate?

Google is requiring marketing messages and other subscribed messages to support one-click unsubscribe functions.

How concerned should businesses be about these requirements?

Most email marketing providers will look at these requirements and tell you: “Check. Check. Check.”

But there’s a catch. 

The requirements apply at the domain level, which means they apply to all of the emails sent by the organization using the domain, not just marketing. That could include sales, receipts, invoices and all email sent from your domain. As in, company-wide.

Takeaways

Talk to our email marketing provider. Go over email reports for the last 3 months or more, and review with them that:

1. They are setup with the authentication mechanisms
2. Number or emails sent per day/week/month and the fluctuations over time
3. Spam rates are kept within limits

Nobody likes to receive spam, and this time sending it could also hurt your deliverability.

Let's combat spam by sending value to our readers.