Email Sender Requirements – Google & Yahoo Updates for 2024

Major email carriers update their email sender requirements regularly, and Google and Yahoo have released new stipulations for February 2024. Whether your website sends transactional emails or you are a regular sender to a mailing list of thousands of members, you must ensure you’re ready.

Otherwise your hard work, your vital communications and, ultimately, your marketing budget could all end up in junk.

In a world of burgeoning spam and unsolicited marketing fodder, maybe not. The cost of entry to the market for email marketing is low. This low barrier means almost anyone can do it. From that shifty Nigerian prince to the most reputable, trusted enterprise – all of them can end up in your inbox with roughly equal authority.

By making it harder for charlatans and thieves to send emails to large numbers of people, those senders who remain should, therefore, be more trustworthy. And you want to be trusted.

By reducing the quantity of emails landing in everyone’s inboxes, yours is more likely to get noticed.

If you send transactional emails, it does (your website probably does). If you send email marketing, it does.

Even if you don’t send lots of emails, if your website sends an essential ‘replace missing password’ mail and that goes into someone’s junk, you may be at the wrong end of an expensive support call.

These are mainly common sense rules. They may be tricky and technical to set up, but they are reasonable. They will all serve to improve customer trust in your emails. It would be best if you were doing this anyway.

Google has additional requirements for bulk senders (those sending emails to more than 5,000 Google addresses daily). Bear in mind this means any automated emails from any source – you may be nearer to that number than you think.

Google rules are generally stricter than those that Yahoo and Microsoft apply. If you match Google’s rules, you will likely meet everyone else’s requirements.

All emails need to come from an email address. Henceforward, these cannot be @gmail.com or @yahoo.com addresses. They must come from a domain name you own (ours come from info@little-fire-digital.co.uk).

So if you don’t have a domain, you do need to invest in one before the start of February 2024. Domains are inexpensive, and we can help you register one. Contact us.

Using your own domain name is not negotiable, without one you will not be able to meet these email sender requirements.

This new domain – sometimes called a “dedicated sending domain” or a “branded sending domain” – is a tremendous help in gaining trust. An email from a domain which matches your branding looks professional and represents substantial subliminal “proof” that you are who you say you are.

If you want to send thousands of emails, it is worth “warming up” your new domain. Rather than flooding the internet with thousands of emails from a new, unknown domain, your software will send emails in small batches for the first few weeks and reduce the chances of your messages triggering alerts with the big email carriers.

Domain Name Settings (DNS) is a technical area. If your DNS is slightly off, the chances of your email arriving made SPAM increase significantly.

These new stipulations require your sending domain to have a DMARC policy setting with at least a value of p=none. However, in our experience, you also need DKIM, SPF and RDNS to achieve truly bomb-proof delivery. Too much jargon? We can help with that.

We can help – contact us.

If you are dispatching marketing emails, these sender requirements stipulate the inclusion of an unsubscribe link in every email. Reputable automated email marketing software will automatically insert a one-click unsubscribe link into the header of each email.

If you aren’t, you really should be.

This unsubscribe process doesn’t necessarily have to be one-click, but it must be explicit and easily reachable.

This goes for everybody. Email marketing is legitimate; transactional emails are essential, but do everyone a favour and keep the quality of your email output high.

Spam complaints affect your reputation as a sender, and your reputation will ultimately affect the number of emails you lose.

Do you see that date in the title? The requirements surrounding email sending change continually. These need a regular review.