Gmail’s sender authentication updates
Gmail has recently announced updates to its sender authentication policies that will thwart spam starting on February 1st, 2024. These changes are all positive and as senders, will reduce the presence of malicious individuals spoofing our businesses and, as recipients, will clean up our inboxes from senders we never asked to hear from.
Yahoo followed suit with similar announced updates a few hours later, but the below recap will focus on Gmail.
What should we be aware of?
Quoting directly from Neil Kumeran, Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust:
Starting in 2024, we’ll require bulk senders to authenticate their emails, allow for easy unsubscription and stay under a reported spam threshold.
Why is this a big update?
Meeting the sender requirements before the deadline may improve your email delivery. If you don’t meet the requirements described in this article, your email might not be delivered as expected, or might be marked as spam.
Who does this impact?
Gmail is setting clear guidelines for all senders, as well as clear guidelines for bulk senders.
“Bulk senders” — meaning if you send to 5,000 or more recipients a day to Gmail recipients.
Proper authentication
SPF, DKIM for all senders, and a DMARC email authentication for your sending domain if you are a bulk sender. Your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to none.
Lower spam rates
You’ll need to keep your spam complaint rate under 0.3%. How do you check your spam compliant rate for Gmail recipients? You set up Postmaster! It’s a free deliverability monitoring tool offered by Gmail; since it doesn’t provide email tools with its feedback loop, you’ll need to monitor it yourself. Not only can you see your spam complaints, but you can also monitor your domain reputation, delivery errors, as well as others.
Unsubscribes
You’ll need to support one-click unsubscribes. Google advises you can adhere to this by ensuring you have one of these in your message headers:
List-Unsubscribe-Post:
List-Unsubscribe=One-ClickList-Unsubscribe:
<https://solarmora.com/unsubscribe/example>
Unless you are managing your email headers yourself, you’ll need to opt into this from your ESP, and most ESP’s should offer this. Here’s how to enable this option in Braze, and here’s an overview of how Customer.io handles the list-unsubscribe header.
I would recommend going to Google, typing in “[your ESP name] list unsubscribe header” to see if you can find documentation on how to enable this, and if not, reach out to your CSM or support team to request this. If they haven’t already started to think about it, they definitely should be aware of the need coming in February.
But what is a list-unsubscribe header? Simply put, it’s just the ability for someone to easily unsubscribe from the message header:
What about preference centers? As long as you offer the above method, you can still advertise the option for recipients to update their choices in subscription via a preference center if you have multiple email topics that subscribers opt into. Gmail directly promotes this as an unsubscribe option:
Let recipients review the individual mailing lists they’re subscribed to. Let them unsubscribe from lists individually, or all lists at once.
Of course, if it feels difficult to a subscriber to update these options, or they need to jump through hoops to get where they are trying to go (read: log in — yuck!) it may increase the likelihood of a spam complaint.
Overall, this isn’t a huge update or surprise. However if not implemented correctly before the deadline, it could cause issues for some senders out there. I highly urge you to reach out to your ESP or MAP, and ask for updates on enabling list-unsubscribe headers. The more that shout about it, the faster things get prioritized!