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Yeah, I guess that’s about right. Source: Twitter/X/Whatever it’s called today.
I’ve got some important info for you today (and a reminder of two free webinars; one recorded, one upcoming and live) related to all of this. First, Yahoo and Google are both indicating that the compliance deadlines for their upcoming new sender requirements are changing. Yahoo is indicating that authentication requirements and low complaint rates must be met by February 2024, but that one-click unsub now has an implementation deadline of June, 2024. Publishing a DMARC policy and authenticating with both DKIM and SPF seems to be required as of February 2024. (More info here.) Google is indicating that “enforcement for bulk senders that don’t meet our email sender guidelines will be gradual and progressive. Starting in February 2024, senders out of compliance are likely to see light and intermittent temporary deferrals. Starting in April, that’ll change to rejections instead of deferrals, and they’ll increase the percentage of non-compliant mail
Wow! This is pretty cool. Ron Amadeo from ARS Technica reports on a significant, AI-based spam filter update at Gmail. Gmail can now understand “adversarial text manipulations” using a new mechanism called RETVec (Resilient & Efficient Text Vectorizer), meaning that it basically renders graphics of everything written to compare it all for spam classification purposes, based on the words and other bits extracted from the message, basically regardless of how they’re encoded. Using emojis to trick people in spam, because writing something it out in words will get you blocked? That might not fly now. Using cyrillic characters (that look visually similar to a user but look different to a text classifier) to try to skate by Gmail filters and hide the nature of what you’re sending? Nuh-uh. (Interestingly, I’ve known for a while now that Gmail can take issue with certain special characters or emojis in certain places in
GPT — Google Postmaster Tools (or Gmail Postmaster Tools) is a truly handy thing for email senders, especially email marketers who need data and deliverability monitoring. It is a reputation dashboard that pulls together IP address reputation, domain reputation, bounce and complaint metrics, and more, all in one handy interface. GPT is domain-based, meaning that you configure it to provide you data on either your return-path or visible from domain, authenticated by way of SPF and DKIM. You tell GPT which domains you want to monitor, and you then prove that you own or have admin access to each given domain by implementing a key string in a TXT record to demonstrate that ownership. Deliverability consultants and marketing managers can use the data to great success — showing proof that whatever changes (strategic, technical, segmentation, etc.) made to a marketing program are showing improvement as measured by the good/bad reputation
Google first warned earlier this year that they’re going to retire accounts that haven’t been accessed at all in the past two years. This affects Gmail accounts — if nobody’s home, no emails have been read, nothing’s going on, Google is now likely to shut down that account. They warned us that the soonest they would start shutting down accounts is December 2023. Well, December is now here. What should we do about it? If you’re a Google user and don’t want to lose that Gmail account, or lose any other data that may be associated with your Google account (files, photos, etc.), Google explained in a recent notification what you can do to make sure that Google continues to denote your account as active. In short? Log in, poke at something. Reply to an email. Edit a file. Show a sign of life. If you’re an email newsletter or email
Gmail has very recently unveiled a series of new deferral/rejection messages. You’ll want to familiarize yourself with the following Gmail rejection messages: 421 4.7.28 Our system has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your IP address. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your IP address has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail containing one of your URL domains. To protect our users from spam, mail with the URL has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to review our Bulk Email Senders Guidelines. – gsmtp 421 4.7.28 Gmail has detected an unusual rate of unsolicited mail originating from your SPF domain. To protect our users from spam, mail sent from your domain has been temporarily rate limited. Please visit https://support.google.com/mail/?p=UnsolicitedRateLimitError to review our
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
I’ve got just a tiny slice of data for you today. I took the top 100 (US) mailbox provider domains, as measured by mail sent to them, and looked for DMARC records. Do they have a DMARC record? And if so, what is the DMARC policy? Things look good from this angle. Seventy of those top 100 domains do indeed have some sort of DMARC policy in place. Of those that have a DMARC policy in place, just over 60% of those domains have a restrictive (p=quarantine or p=reject policy). This is particularly timely given that Gmail’s upcoming requirements say you should not impersonate (send as) gmail.com in your from address. Based on how internet service providers (ISPs) and mailbox providers (MBPs) are moving to respect DMARC policy, that restriction also applies to a good two-thirds of the top MBP domains. Remember: Your from address should only contain a domain
TrueAccord’s Josie Garcia is a good friend and very savvy deliverability wizard who has helped many senders address inbox woes and data hygiene issues throughout her career. Currently she’s helping a debt collector improve their sending practices — very much a challenging industry from a deliverability perspective. When she told me of her recent successes, I asked her if she would be kind enough to put something together to share with the world, and she was kind enough to do so, leading to today’s post. Take it away, Josie. When a sender’s email program assigns different engagement levels to groups based on specific criteria, naturally, some groups will perform better than others. This can, at times, be challenging. Adding to the challenges, Gmail and Yahoo have recently implemented stricter requirements for bulk senders, set to be enforced in 2024. If you use Gmail Postmaster Tools, and one of your domains
Eric Goldman is Associate Dean of Research, Professor of Law and Co-Director, High Tech Law Institute, at Santa Clara University. And he blogs about legal stuff, often stuff relating to the internet and privacy. I find his blog a must read. So he’s a good guy to turn to when you want quality analysis of the RNC’s first round loss in their lawsuit against Google. And here it is, perhaps a bit delayed, but still worth reading.