Gmail is strengthening its security with new regulations, targeted at bulk email senders, which could impact how your business sends out campaigns.
Update January 2024
Email providers such as Mailchimp and Campaign Monitor are alerting you to verify your domain, by updating DNS records with DKIM, DMARC, and SPF protocols. This needs to be complete in order to continue sending emails to your customers/clients.
Gmail Update 2024
In 2024, Gmail’s update will require bulk senders to authenticate their emails. The reason for this is to allow users to easily unsubscribe, and give enhanced spam protection.
Gmail already has many security features to protect users from spam, phishing and malware, however, with email being one of the main sources of communication, fighting spam is a constant process.
The new update will affect senders who send more than 5,000 messages to Gmail addresses daily. Failure to comply could result in Gmail and Yahoo rejecting email delivery to users.
Email Validation
The primary focus of the new email security update is to ensure that senders verify that they are who they say they are. This allows users to feel confident when relying on an email’s source.
You will need to authenticate your email by enabling SPF, DKIM and DMARC. This shows that you own the domain that you are sending emails from.
Simple Unsubscribe
Large senders will now need to give users the ability to unsubscribe from commercial emails in one click. Additionally, unsubscribe requests will need to be processed within 2 days.
Spam Threshold
Although Gmail already includes many features to keep unwanted emails at bay, they will now enforce a clear spam threshold that senders must stay under. Hopefully this will reduce spam in a user’s inbox.
Steps to Get Your Email Seen
Here are a few steps that your company can make to ensure marketing emails are not flagged as spam:
- Personalise your email, to ensure they are seen as valuable
- Create more manual emails which helps to reduce the volume of generic emails
- Include unsubscribe links to emails ensuring they are visible
Yahoo is also implementing similar requirements. By enforcing new rules, it will allow users to more easily find the messages that mean something to them, making it more user friendly.
