changes
There’s no two ways about it — it truly is getting trickier to deliver email to Gmail lately. There’s a lot going on here — from the recent past, to what’s happening today, through to the very near future. Let me jump right into it, starting with changes that are more likely to affect ESP/CRM customers, marketing senders and newsletter publishers. Get ready: the bounce apocalypse is coming. Google warned us in mid-2023 that they will now begin to disable and delete Google accounts (including Gmail accounts) after two years of inactivity. This starts December 1, 2023. Your bounce rates are likely to go up. Don’t fret — these truly are invalid, abandoned addresses. Suppressing these addresses when they bounce helps you reduce useless sending effort. There truly was nobody home. Learn more on this “digital wake up call” from fellow deliverability expert Matthew Vernhout here. “Over quota” and “out
If you’re one of those weirdos (like me) who tracks what email providers hosts mail for what domains, you’ll want to take note of this. In the email industry’s ongoing efforts to improve email security, Microsoft is adding the ability for Microsoft-hosted domains to implement DANE with DNSSEC. As Microsoft explains, “SMTP DANE is a security protocol that uses DNS to verify the authenticity of the certificates used for securing email communication with TLS and protecting against TLS downgrade attacks. DNSSEC is a set of extensions to DNS that provides cryptographic verification of DNS records, preventing DNS spoofing and adversary-in-the-middle attacks to DNS.” Anyway, my point is not to dissect the potential value of DANE or theorize how long it’ll take for a majority of customer domains to be updated (Microsoft hosts mail for 750,000 of the top ten million domains, and I’m sure many more beyond that). Instead, I
Email feedback loops have a long history as a component of the sending, receiving and handling of email messages en masse. I vaguely recall that AOL was the first entity to set up what we commonly think of as a feedback loop — with their now-common process to register your sending IP addresses with the ISP, and if anybody complains about your mail, the ISP will send you a report back with the full headers and source (with perhaps a bit of it redacted at the instruction of some lawyer) so that you can count, report on, and review these spam reports. Review of that data could identify bad senders, identify bad lists, and help stop mail to people who don’t want the mail. (Indeed, the Wayback Machine shows mention of AOL’s Feedback Loop all the way back in 2004.)As that feedback loop mechanism grew in popularity, various other ISPs