As the fight against spam emails rages on, Google has recently introduced its latest defense mechanism in the form of RETVec. The Resilient and Efficient Text Vectorizer for Gmail is an advanced multilingual anti-spam tool that blocks unwanted or predatory emails in an upgrade to the conventional mechanisms. In this blog, we shall take a closer look at this tool and its implications for you as a marketer. Let’s dive in. RETVec: Revolutionizing your inbox game Gmail uses text classification models to detect and prevent phishing, spam content, or scam. As soon as the models identify these texts, they block and filter out the malicious email content to your spam folder. However, these machine learning models can struggle with this identification if cyberattackers use typos, invisible characters, and non-Latin characters to bypass the classifiers (e.g. they spell “coupon” as ©oμpΟn or “Offer” as O 𝑓 𝑓 er). If, let’s say
With Google and Yahoo transitioning several long-standing best practices to enforced sender requirements, we created the following guide to ensure you understand where you can find evidence of delivery issues and begin to understand what additional steps you need to take in order to ensure you are sending according to their guidelines. What are error codes? Email error codes and bounce strings are generated when one email server attempts delivery to another email server that results in a failure. Error codes are also commonly referred to as bounce codes, SMTP errors, or Delivery Status Notifications (DSN). You can use the messages and codes to help understand the underlying reason and attempt to troubleshoot them. Most often, the source sending emails on your behalf will have developed software to handle errors in an automated fashion for you. Where some email sources may expose these errors to you through their interface, the
Yes, it’s another yahoogle best practices post. Google divide their requirements for senders into those sending more than 5,000 messages a day, and those sending less. Yahoo divide their requirements into “All Senders” and “Bulk Senders”, and explicitly don’t define that via a volume threshold: “A bulk sender is classified as an email sender sending a significant volume of mail. We will not specify a volume threshold.”. So … do you need to count how many messages you send, to see if Google thinks you’re a bulk sender or not? No. Definitely not. Google state a threshold just so they don’t have to argue about the definition of “bulk sender”, I’m sure. In practice they’ll be using the same definition as bulk sender as Yahoo – we know it when we see it. But the real distinction isn’t volume – it’s whether you’re professional, grown-up sender or a hobbyist. If
Yes, it’s another yahoogle best practices post. Google divide their requirements for senders into those sending more than 5,000 messages a day, and those sending less. Yahoo divide their requirements into “All Senders” and “Bulk Senders”, and explicitly don’t define that via a volume threshold: “A bulk sender is classified as an email sender sending a significant volume of mail. We will not specify a volume threshold.”. So … do you need to count how many messages you send, to see if Google thinks you’re a bulk sender or not? No. Definitely not. Google state a threshold just so they don’t have to argue about the definition of “bulk sender”, I’m sure. In practice they’ll be using the same definition as bulk sender as Yahoo – we know it when we see it. But the real distinction isn’t volume – it’s whether you’re professional, grown-up sender or a hobbyist. If
Just a very, very short post with links to the Yahoo and Google requirements FAQs. Given I can’t ever remember them I’m guessing lots of y’all can’t either. Yahoo: https://senders.yahooinc.com/best-practices/ Google: https://support.google.com/a/answer/14229414
On January 9th at 6pm GMT, 1pm EST and 9am PST I’ll be speaking with Nout Boctor-Smith of Nine Lives Digital about the new Yahoo and Google technical requirements. In this webinar you’ll: Learn more about what these new email sender guidelines entail and how they differ from the status quo Understand why you’re being asked to do things that were previously handled by your ESP (email service provider) Discover what adjustments you can make now to ensure your emails reach their intended inboxes in 2024 We know folks have a lot of questions about these changes and how to comply with them, so we’ve made sure to leave time for them. I’m so looking forward to this opportunity and I hope you can join us! Reserve Your Space!
Happy 2024, everyone! We’ve released a shiny new tool to let folks self-check a lot of common questions we see about email requirements. Go to AboutMy.email and send an email to the email address it gives you. Once it receives that email it will go through it and do many of the basic checks we’d usually do to check the technical health of a client’s email1 and displays a detailed report of what it finds. Details it reports on include SPF DKIM DMARC BIMI, including details about the certificate and image What IP address it was sent from, and whether it has valid DNS The size of the mail as sent (no more arguments about Gmail clipping size) The SMTP session as it was delivered The raw payload of the mail as delivered Checks for line length, non-ascii characters, non-CRLF line endings Headers, both pretty (including RFC 2047 decoded) and
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
Recent discussions in the email security ecosystem have highlighted a security loophole concerning Google’s handling of emails sent to a Google Group. This issue arises particularly when the emails come from a domain with a DMARC policy set to p=quarantine or p=reject. Google Groups functions similarly to a mailing list. When a group address receives an email, Google forwards a copy to each group member, retaining the original From: header. This From: header is crucial, as it’s what recipient systems use to determine which domain to check against for DMARC compliance. In essence, when Google forwards these emails, it’s as if Google is spoofing the domain being forwarded. This becomes problematic with domains like AOL or Yahoo, where the receiving system will reject the email, recognizing that Google isn’t authorized to send on their behalf. How scammers exploit Google Groups’ email forwarding Domain Acquisition: Scammers start by acquiring a new