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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
If you’re an ESP with small customers you may have looked at the recent Google / Yahoo requirements around DMARC-style alignment for authentication and panicked a bit. Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery.…For direct mail, the domain in the sender’s From: header must be aligned with either the SPF domain or the DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment. So everyone who’s using their gmail address to send bulk mail is going to have to stop doing that within the next few months if they still want their mail to be delivered. For any ESP customer that already has, or can be convinced to buy, a domain for their web presence maybe they can be persuaded to switch to using that – though even if they can, onboarding 100,000 technically naive users
On Tuesday, October 3, Google and Yahoo announced updated sender requirements for those who wish to send mail to Gmail or Yahoo Mail successfully and in volume. Marcel Becker from Yahoo and Neil Kumaran from Google explain in detail what senders will have to do if they don’t want to find their mail blocked at either mailbox provider. They warn that failure to comply will result in rejected mail in early 2024.Any changes here really are evolutionary more than revolutionary. These have been solid “best practice” recommendations for a good long while; so I think of this as both “documenting what everybody knows” and laying the groundwork for reasoned, documented policy-based blocking of non-conforming mail. Those requirements boil down to this:Authenticate email. We were moving to a point where you basically already had to authenticate your email messages if you wanted inbox placement success; now it’s fair to say that it
Google are circulating a new set of requirements for bulk senders on their blog. So are Yahoo. It’s almost like postmasters talk to each other or something. If you dig through the links in the Gmail blog post you can find this summary of what they’ll be requiring from bulk senders by February: Set up SPF or DKIM email authentication for your domain. Ensure that sending domains or IPs have valid forward and reverse DNS records, also referred to as PTR records. Learn more Keep spam rates reported in Postmaster Tools below 0.3%. Learn more Format messages according to the Internet Message Format standard (RFC 5322). Don’t impersonate Gmail From: headers. Gmail will begin using a DMARC quarantine enforcement policy, and impersonating Gmail From: headers might impact your email delivery. If you regularly forward email, including using mailing lists or inbound gateways, add ARC headers to outgoing email. ARC headers indicate the message was forwarded and identify
By Marcel Becker, Sr Director Product ManagementA key mission of Yahoo is to deliver messages that consumers want to receive and filter out the messages they don’t. To guide and help senders support us in that mission, we have documented our sending best practices on our Sender Hub. In addition, our postmaster teams have assisted the sending community to achieve the best results for them and ultimately for our users.Yet, numerous bulk senders fail to secure and set up their systems correctly, allowing malicious actors to exploit their resources without detection. A pivotal aspect of addressing these concerns involves sender validation, leveraging email authentication standards to guarantee the verification of the email sender’s identity. Sending properly authenticated messages helps us to better identify and block billions of malicious messages and declutter our users’ inboxes. But we believe we can do even more to improve the quality of the emails our users receive as
Thanks to Denis O’Sullivan for again sharing great deliverability insight. This time around it’s an interview with Yahoo Postmaster Lili Crowley, one of the good people who help to try to keep the barbarians from getting through the gate. It’s always good to learn directly from those in charge, to help you keep looking like the good sender that you are.
Having trouble delivering mail to Yahoo? Wondering how that all works? Why does your mail bounce? TS03, TS04, and more? What do you do about it? How do you triage, troubleshoot and address Yahoo (and AOL) deliverability issues? My Kickbox colleague Jennifer Nespola Lantz explains it all here.
Are you seeing this bounce message when trying to send mail to Yahoo subscribers?451 Message temporarily deferred due to unresolvable RFC.5321 from domain; see https://postmaster.yahooinc.com/error-codesAnd you’ve checked and confirmed that your sending domain seems to resolve for you, so you’re wondering, what the heck is going on and what do I do about it? If so, Steve Atkins has got you covered. Over on the Word to the Wise blog, he explains how Yahoo is looking for an SOA record (Start of Authority) in DNS and depending on how your DNS and delegation are configured, you could be misconfigured in a way that most don’t notice, but would fail this check.Click on over to Word to the Wise to learn more. Thank you, Steve, for clearing this up! It’s a tricky one.
Seen this recently? 451 Message temporarily deferred due to unresolvable RFC.5321 from domain; see https://postmaster.yahooinc.com/error-codes This is Yahoo doing some extra work to identify that the 5321.From domain1 of the mail is acceptable to them. Yahoo are going (slightly) beyond what’s required for the return path to be valid in SMTP terms. SMTP just requires that the return path be syntactically valid – i.e., looks like an email address – and that it be deliverable. The basic DNS check you might do would be to check if the right-hand-side of the email address has an MX record2. So for a bounce address of bounces@email.example.com you’d check to see if email.example.com had an MX record. Yahoo want to also check that it looks like a legitimate address in another way, that the organizational domain of the right-hand-side looks legitimate. The organizational domain is what you might think of as a “domain”
Multiple folks have reported via multiple forums today (May 22nd) that Yahoo’s ISP Feedback Loop (called the “Complaint Feedback Loop/CFL”) may not be working properly at the moment. People are reporting either no volume at all for the past few days or greatly reduced volume of spam complaint reports. I am reliably informed that Yahoo is aware of the issue and is working on fixing things. I’ll update this post when I have more information.