New Requirements for Bulk Senders

UPDATE: You need to authenticate with both DKIM and SPF.

Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog.

So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something.

If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February:

  • Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain.
  • Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. Learn more
  • Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Learn more
  • Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322).
  • Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.
  • If you regularly forward email, including using mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify you as the forwarder. Mailing list senders should also add a List-id: header, which specifies the mailing list, to outgoing messages.

And for anyone sending more than about 5,000 emails a day, also:

  • Set up DMARC email authentication for your sending domain. Your DMARC enforcement policy can be set to none. Learn more
  • For direct mail, the domain in the sender’s From: header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment.
  • For subscribed messages, enable one-click unsubscribe with a clearly visible unsubscribe link in the message body. Learn more

These all seem very reasonable. They’re things that have been best practice for a long time, that everyone should be doing (and that I’d have guessed large mailbox providers were soft-enforcing already).

I’ve been chatting with folks on slack, and worked out some clarifications. Google will be publishing DMARC p=quarantine for at least gmail.com and googlemail.com. That means that anyone sending a small business or personal newsletter with their @gmail.com or @yahoo.com email address in the From: header needs to stop doing that pretty sharpish.

The one-click unsubscribe requirements mean that all bulk mail should be using List-Unsubscribe: and List-Unsubscribe-Post: headers to handle in-MUA unsubscription (ideally, anyway, but you can probably get away with just List-Unsubscribe: with a mailto: URL). You should also have a visible unsubscribe link in the body of your message (and that should link to a page that makes it easy for a recipient to unsubscribe from all mail by clicking a big, obvious button). Having a valid List-Unsubscribe-Post requires that your mail be DKIM signed, so that’s another reason not to rely solely on SPF for authentication.

And if you’re not using DMARC yet, it’s time to publish a record with p=none, and start making sure that your authentication is aligned.

These are all good practices, and the large consumer mailbox providers are giving you a nudge towards implementing them. Soon. Make it your New Years Resolution.

Related Posts

Things you need to read: 2/5/16

gearheadAsk the Expert: How Can Email Marketers Stay Out of Gmail Jail and in the Inbox? The expert in question is an old friend of mine, Andrew Barrett. I met Andrew online in the late 90s, and we worked together (briefly) at MAPS. He was out of email for a while, but I’m pleased he came back to share his talents with us. The information in the article is valuable for anyone who struggles with getting to the Gmail inbox.
Unclutter Your Inbox, Archive & Keep Your Messages. Shiv Shankar talks about some new features at Yahoo Mail. With a simple click, you can archive email so it’s available to search, but not cluttering up your inbox. One of the things that jumped out at me from that article is that Yahoo is providing 1 TB of storage. That’s more than Google!
The EEC is doing a survey on the impact of CASL and want to hear from marketers. Go check out their blog post and take their survey.
Sparkpost has a guest blog from Alex Garcia-Tobar, co-founder of Valimail about common DKIM failures. I’ve met Alex a few times and I’ve always found him a pleasure to talk to. Alex is somewhat new in the email space, but he really gets some of the challenges in the authentication space. A lot of the issues he mentions in that blog post like lack of key rotation and shared keys are some of the technical debt I was talking about in my predictions for 2016 post.
What links have you read this week that are worth sharing?

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Gmail / Apps authentication issues

I’ve seen several reports of unexpected rejections for unauthenticated email to Google over IPv6 today. Unauthenticated mail over IPv6 is a bad idea, but Google usually spam folders it rather than rejecting it.
The Gmail status dashboard is reporting an issue “Some messages sent to consumer Gmail accounts are being rejected due to authentication enforcement” so something isn’t working as intended.

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June 2014: The month in email

Each month, we like to focus on a core email feature or function and present an overview for people looking to learn more. This month, we addressed authentication with SPF.
We also talked about feedback mechanisms, and the importance for senders to participate in FBL processes.
In our ongoing discussions about spam filters, we took a look at the state of our own inboxes and lamented the challenge spam we get from Spamarrest. We also pointed out a post from Cloudmark where they reiterate much of what we’ve been saying about filters: there’s no secret sauce, just a continuing series of efforts to make sure recipients get only the mail they want and expect to receive. We also looked at a grey area in the realm of wanted and expected mail: role accounts (such as “marketing@companyname.com”) and how ESPs handle them.
As always, getting into the Gmail inbox is a big priority for our clients and other senders. We talked a bit about this here, and a bit more about the ever-changing world of filters here.
On the subject of list management, we wrote about the state of affiliate mailers and the heightened delivery challenges they face getting in the inbox. We got our usual quota of spam, and a call from a marketer who had purchased our names on a list. You can imagine how effective that was for them.
And in a not-at-all-surprising development, spammers have started to employ DMARC workarounds. We highlighted some of the Yahoo-specific issues in a post that raises more questions.
We also saw some things we quite liked in June. In the Best Practices Hall of Fame, we gave props to this privacy policy change notification and to our bank’s ATM receipts.
We also reviewed some interesting new and updated technology in the commercial MTA space, and were happy to share those findings.

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