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Gmail and Yahoo: New Requirements for Senders

Imagen Gmail and Yahoo: New Requirements for Sen

When two major email providers like Google and Yahoo make changes to their policies, it's advisable to stay alert and prepare because most likely, there will be many contacts in your lists using their services. This time, they have agreed to define new requirements affecting sender validation, to prevent spam to their users.

From February 2024, these senders who don't comply with the requests will receive notifications from providers to adopt the necessary changes. In addition, from April 2024 Gmail and Yahoo mail will start rejecting a percentage of non-compliant mail traffic. If you use Acrelia for your email marketing, you don't need to worry about the technical aspect because we have been complying with their new specifications for a while now: deliverability is a factor we take very seriously!

What are the new requirements for email marketing senders?

They include best practices that all email senders must follow to achieve good delivery capacity with email providers. Gmail, Yahoo, and other providers will require alignment with these practices for those sending more than 5,000 mass emails per day or if they have a significant number of recipients marking their emails as spam.

Both Google and Yahoo published their recommendations in October 2023, giving senders a few months to correct their practices.

Source: Google

Authenticate the sender's email

To provide more confidence about who is behind the sending, alignment with the domain through SPF and DKIM will be mandatory; and strengthen it by applying DMARC policies. This configuration serves as prevention against phishing campaigns, as it verifies the sender's domain to confirm that it is indeed who it claims to be.

As a result, mass mailings will only be possible from accounts with their domain, meaning @gmail.com or @googlemail.com will no longer be valid as senders.

However, if you don't have your domain, platforms like Acrelia additionally allow you to send with SRS addresses using a generic domain. All with the same guarantees of delivery and deliverability.

Want to use your domain in Acrelia? Contact us.

Allow one-click unsubscribe

Canceling the subscription should be a straightforward process, but not all companies make it easy. Now they will have no choice but to include that button in their messages and/or headers and assure recipients that it will be done promptly: they should not receive any communication after unsubscribing, with the sender having a maximum of 2 days to process the unsubscribe.

In Acrelia, all message headers have always included the possibility of automatic unsubscribe from the email client itself, as well as an unsubscribe link in the footer of all messages, so you don't have to worry about this change either.

Send only desired information

It seems obvious that if you comply with the GDPR, you are sending desired emails, but Gmail and Yahoo want to ensure that users' inboxes are not filled with junk mail, so they will be attentive to complaints and the spam percentage of senders: it must be less than 0.3% (Gmail and we recommend less than 0.1%). If it is consistently higher, deliverability will decrease, and you risk being blocked and ending up on blacklists.

You can check this data in Acrelia's statistics to identify any patterns that may help you distinguish topics, frequency, or texts that increase this percentage and reduce it if necessary.

Who is affected by the changes in Gmail and Yahoo Mail

Both providers agree that the ultimate reason is to combat fraudulent sending and spam, so they are mainly targeting senders of mass mailings.

Yahoo has not specified it, but in the case of Gmail, the specific data is set at those who send more than 5000 daily to their accounts. Remember that this can be both users ending in @gmail.com or @googlemail.com and a company using Google Workspace, and therefore, it may not be obvious at first glance.

Even if these changes were eventually applied to all senders, using Acrelia as an email marketing platform already complies with their recommendations, allowing you to focus on creating communications that meet your marketing goals and leaving us the technical part.

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