As you may have heard, Gmail and Yahoo have announced beginning in February of 2024, they will enforce stricter authentication requirements on email senders. If your email doesn’t conform to the new guidelines, your email may not be delivered as expected or might be marked as spam.
Most of these requirements are part of established deliverability best practices. The next few months are a great time to review and update your practices.
Below is a checklist you can follow to make sure you meet these requirements.
And if you are new to the world of SPF, DKIM, and DMARC - don’t worry, it sounds a little intimidating, but you’ll get it pretty quickly.
Make sure your SPF, DKIM, and DMARC records are set up for your sending domain:
- SPF and
DKIM are two ways to verify that Targeted Email is allowed to send email on your behalf. These records are created in the service that hosts your domain’s DNS record (Cloudflare, Godaddy, etc.).
Use Targeted Email’s Deliverability settings page to check your SPF and DKIM records. We will tell you if the records exist, if they have the correct information, and - if not - what information you need to add. There is also help documentation to guide you.
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DMARC is another record you will add to your DNS. This record tells email service providers what to do if they receive an email from your domain that does not ‘align’ with your SPF or DKIM records. And we’ve got documentation to help.
- Do not use a sending domain that your organization does not own (e.g. gmail.com, yahoo.com, aol.com
, hotmail.com, etc.) in your From Address when sending email out of Targeted Email or Online Actions
Gmail and Yahoo will identify this email as SPAM and quarantine it (send it to a SPAM folder). We will be adding validation into Targeted Email as we approach Gmail's and Yahoo's February deadline.
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Keep SPAM rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%
Postmaster Tools is a free service from Gmail. It reports on SPAM rates associated with your sending domain. Gmail, unlike some other tools, does not inform us when a receiver clicks the ‘Report SPAM’ button. To monitor we encourage you to signup for Postmaster Tools. You should also be keeping an eye on your SPAM rates in Targeted Email.
Next, a few requirements that we already have taken care of for you:
- One-click unsubscribe: We automatically inject Gmail’s preferred ‘list-unsubscribe’ method into the emails you send - which allows Gmail to offer an unsubscribe button at the top of every email. Also, your unsubscribe page does not require login or even typing of the email address - just a button click and the email is unsubscribed.
- Our sending domains and IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records (also referred to as PTR)
- Emails are sent in RFC 5322
We will reach out a few more times before the February 1, 2024 deadline.
Thanks!
Customer Support
NGP VAN
