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?

Read More

Email predictions for 2015

Welcome to a whole new year. It seems the changing of the year brings out people predicting what they think will happen in the coming year. It’s something I’ve indulged in a couple times over my years of blogging, but email is a generally stable technology and it’s kind of boring to predict a new interface or a minor tweak to filters. Of course, many bloggers will go way out on a limb and predict the death of email, but I think that’s been way over done.
ChangeConstant
Even major technical advancements, like authentication protocols and the rise of IPv6, are not usually sudden. They’re discussed and refined through the IETF process. While some of these changes may seem “all of a sudden” to some end users, they’re usually the result of years of work from dedicated volunteers. The internet really doesn’t do flag days.
One major change in 2014, that had significant implications for email as a whole, was a free mail provider abruptly publishing a DMARC p=reject policy. This caused a lot of issues for some small business senders and for many individual users. Mailing list maintainers are still dealing with some of the fallout, and there are ongoing discussions about how best to mitigate the problems DMARC causes non-commercial email.
Still, DMARC as a protocol has been in development for a few years. A number of large brands and commercial organizations were publishing p=reject policies. The big mail providers were implementing DMARC checking, and rejection, on their inbound mail. In fact, this rollout is one of the reasons that the publishing of p=reject was a problem. With the flip of a switch, mail that was once deliverable became undeliverable.
Looking back through any of the 2014 predictions, I don’t think anyone predicted that two major mailbox providers would implement p=reject policies, causing widespread delivery failures across the Internet. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted it, all of my discussions with people about DMARC centered around business using DMARC to protect their brand. No one mentioned ISPs using it to force their customers away from 3rd party services and discussion lists.
I think the only constant in the world of email is change, and most of the time that change isn’t that massive or sudden, 2014 and the DMARC upheaval notwithstanding.
But, still, I have some thoughts on what might happen in the coming year. Mostly more of the same as we’ve seen over the last few years. But there are a couple areas I think we’ll see some progress made.

Read More

Mail Client Improvements

There’s been extensive and ongoing development of email through the years, but much of it has been behind the scenes. We were focused on the technology and safety and robustness of the channel. We’re not done yet, but things are much better than they were.
The good part of that is there is some space to make improvements to the inbox as well. Over the last few months there have been a number of announcements from different mail client providers about how they’re updating their mail client.

Read More