gmail

Gmail has long pushed for adoption of email authentication best practices from email senders, effectively making it tough to get to the inbox without proper email authentication in place. They also, for years now, have been very cautious about what mail they accept over IPv6, declining to accept mail over IPv6 that fails authentication checks. Well, now those same checks now apply to all mail sent to Gmail — over IPv4 or IPv6. Meaning, if you want to send mail to Gmail, you need to authenticate that mail with Domain Keys Identified Mail (DKIM) or Sender Policy Framework (SPF).If you’re trying to send mail to Gmail subscribers, and the mail doesn’t authenticate properly, it’ll be rejected with this error message:550-5.7.26 This mail is unauthenticated, which poses a security risk to the sender and Gmail users, and has been blocked. The sender must authenticate with at least one of SPF or

Mike Masnick from Techdirt’s got a scathing breakdown of how the judge just wasn’t buying what the RNC was selling; derisively detailing their failure to prove Google bias against right-wing political senders. It’s definitely worth a read. He closes with saying that with election season upcoming, maybe that will spur the RNC to appeal the ruling. Who’s he kidding? We know this isn’t the end of it.

Remember that the RNC had sued Google, alleging that RNC emails were being unfairly dropped into Gmail spam folders due to political animus on the part of Google? Well, so far, things aren’t going in the RNC’s favor. Judge Daniel Calabretta said that while it was a “close case,” the political committee had not “sufficiently pled that Google acted in bad faith.” The judge is leaving room for the RNC to re-file, so I’m sure this isn’t the last we’ve heard of this. Read more here and here.

The Verge reports on a new change announced by Google: There’s now a good chance they’ll ask you to verify your login when you change certain Gmail settings, adjusting things like IMAP email access or adding email forwarding to a new address. Here’s the details from Google. This is a good thing, meant to prevent stealth account takeovers where you might think everything is fine, but a bad actor could be siphoning mail away without the account’s owner realizing what’s going on. I’m sure it’s going to annoy me, though, since I have a zillion Gmail accounts all with various settings around forwarding and IMAP that I am often modifying. But, I’ll happily put up with it in the name of making Gmail a more secure platform for users.[ H/T: Jennifer Nespola Lantz ]

As mentioned before, Google’s planning to disable and delete accounts that have been inactive for two years or longer; they promise not to start doing this until December; they have been warning every Google user of this change via email; and they promise to further notify impacted users before disabling specific accounts.Some folks are up in arms about this change in Google policy. According to CNBC, “Google’s plan to purge inactive accounts isn’t sitting well with some users.” But the truth is, Google has kind of been going overboard notifying everybody, and they’re clearly still in the midst of that notification process.I personally have received twenty three individual email notifications of this Google policy change so far. Perhaps I have more Google accounts than the average person, but it sure seems to me like they’re notifying everyone. I’d be surprised if anyone were really caught off guard by this policy

Recently, smart folks just discovered that Gmail is stripping out background image CSS from email content. This is new, and very annoying. Over on the Parcel blog, Mark Robbins explains the situation and provides some ideas for working around the issue.Is a design issue a deliverability issue? Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It certainly can lead to display issues and even accessibility problems. And it can be painful, even if it doesn’t stop mail from getting to the inbox. So, I figured it can’t hurt to share stuff like this.[ H/T: Parcel Newsletter ]

As mentioned before, Google is now going to retire accounts gone inactive for at least two years. Indeed, Google just today sent me an email notice explaining this in some detail, which I thought would be handy to share here. For Google, of course, the focus of this messaging is their individual users. For you, reading about this on a deliverability blog, the focus is what senders should know and do about this — how should it guide you with regard to sending mail to Gmail subscribers.That guidance ultimately is nothing new: As I’ve said before, don’t treat subscriber addresses as though they last forever. Even before this change, there were good reasons to do this — to periodically sunset (inactivate) addresses that don’t respond. This new change just reinforces that guidance. Addresses will eventually bounce — and then who knows, maybe at some point in the future Google could

A friend asked recently why they’re not receiving feedback loop complaint data back from Gmail subscribers. After all, she pointed out, Gmail does indeed have a Feedback Loop, does it not? What’s up with that?If you’re lucky, your sending platform is already configured to ingest and utilize data from ISP Feedback Loops (and most are). If that’s the case, you’re likely seeing complaints logged (and complainers unsubscribed) as a result of “this is spam” reports from various MBPs (mailbox providers) and ISPs (internet service providers). Yahoo, Microsoft and Comcast are perhaps the largest providers that offer these complaint feedback loops, and if you head over to Validity’s “Feedback Loop Service” website, you can see the whole list of 20+ ISPs and MBPs that participate in a Validity-managed “universal” feedback loop service. If you check that list on the Validity website, you’ll notice that there are three mailbox providers missing: Microsoft, Yahoo

Double opt-in (also called “confirmed opt-in”) can help to prevent list hygiene problems, but some people are dead set against it. I’m not going to change their minds. I’m not even going to try to. But I’ve seen some changes at Gmail lately that lead me to think that I’m doing the world a disservice if I don’t at least warn you: If you’re a small newsletter publisher or small marketing sender, if you’re anyone using an SMB-focused or shared resource focused email sending platform, you’re putting yourself at risk by not employing double opt-in.Recently, a number of us in the email deliverability space started to hear that a bunch of smaller email senders, ones that were otherwise doing just fine yesterday, were suddenly finding their mail going to the spam folder in Gmail mailboxes today. Diving into it, this was all specific to a certain email provider, and was

Google is saying that as early as December 2023, they’re going to start retiring inactive accounts. Meaning, if you haven’t signed into your Google account in at least two years, Google could shut down that account, meaning you’d be saying goodbye to that Gmail email address.This means that eventually, bounce rates to gmail.com addresses will start to go up. This itself isn’t a bad thing, but it does give Google another way to compare good senders and bad senders — if you’re sending mail that has a higher bounce rate than others, you’re less likely to be a good sender, and this could end up contributing to a poorer sender reputation (and deliverability issues). This was the case with other ISPs in years past, though it’s unclear to me exactly how commonly this is part of the reputation equation today.THAT all means that it’s important that you monitor for hard