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
Since I wrote about it last month the requirements for bulk senders to Yahoo and Google have changed a little. The big change is that bulk senders need to authenticate with both SPF and DKIM, rather than SPF or DKIM. Only one of those has to align with the 822 From: header.
Michael Crider (staff writer for PCWorld) is one of the many folks reporting on Google’s new real-time anti-phishing protection in the Chrome web browser. This means checking every domain you’re trying to visit against some sort of domain or URL blocking list. Aside from the privacy concerns (which I’ll leave to Michael to cover), I’m wondering about how likely this live monitoring and check process will be to subject to false positives. Is this just a quicker check against a now more-quickly updated Google Safe Browsing blocklist? If you find your email or website domain on your list in error, do you still go to this same “report error” page as before? How swiftly will they review and reset accidental listings? When something like this is scaled up and sped up, accuracy and/or manual review doesn’t always seem to scale up with it. So, color me full of concerns. Read
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.
Starting February, 2024, long established email authentication best practices will become a requirement. It’s as simple as that, folks. This news may be alarming to you for a variety of reasons; you may have previously interpreted these guidelines as being optional or didn’t understand the related technical complexities. Or maybe you trusted that your email service provider, or IT Department was taking care of this for you. Whichever camp you may be in, the responsibility is yours to ensure you are compliant and have the proper visibility to maintain that favorable status from that point forward. As abuse continues to mature, so must the controls that have been implemented to secure the email channel. We applaud Google and Yahoo for ushering this new reality in much of the same way that dmarcian has always taken a standards and best practices approach. Our mission has been to spread DMARC across the
Lots and lots of holidays, events and special days are approaching. Thanksgiving. Black Friday. Small business Saturday. Cyber Monday. Giving Tuesday. Christmas. Kwanzaa. Hanukkah. (And more!) And for each of these, somebody somewhere wants to send an email about it, probably to sell something. This is the busy season. This fourth quarter of the year is prime time for email marketing efforts. Everybody is ramping up. Inboxes are more full than at other times of the year, because so many folks send as much as they can, looking for as much of that email-related revenue as possible. This brings the question: how does one prepare for deliverability success during this time? My colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz, along with Gene Gusman from Zeta, recently presented a free webinar on this topic (good stuff – check it out!) and I though it would be good to add my own two cents. The
