What email senders need to know about Gmail’s latest mandates
October 23, 2023 | 2 minute readIf you send more than 5,000 emails to Gmail on any given day, you’re going to want to read this post. One of the biggest players in email has announced some changes for bulk and marketing senders.
Anyone that has interacted with the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) Email Delivery team knows how much of an emphasis we put on email authentication: Sender policy framework (SPF), DomainKeys identified mail (DKIM), and related items like custom return paths.
Gmail validated their move last year to require that any email sent to a Gmail address must have some form of authentication, and as a result, “the number of unauthenticated messages Gmail users receive plummet by 75%, which has helped declutter inboxes while blocking billions of malicious messages with higher precision.”
In short, every sending domain must have the correct SPF and DKIM. If you’re sending through OCI Email Delivery, that means updated records using our SPF include and a new DKIM record.
By February 2024, Gmail is enforcing one-click unsubscription with the address needing to be removed by a bulk sender within 48 hours of the unsubscribe request. That process should be easy for bulk senders. Anything more complicated is leading to spam complaints and bigger issues for senders.
A one-click unsubscribe involves everything in the name. A recipient clicks a link and are automatically removed. No login is required and nothing dissuades the actual act of unsubscribing, which is a violation of CAN-SPAM rules.
Gmail continues to turn the heat up on sending too much email as they “enforce a clear spam rate threshold that senders must stay under to ensure Gmail recipients aren’t bombarded with unwanted messages." For bulk senders, only send to those who have opted in to receive emails from your company and remove unengaged users from lists. Otherwise, your mail won’t get to the inbox for anyone.
As noted by Gmail, all of these are best practices that senders should be doing anyway and that other providers like Yahoo are also enforcing. They’re giving a heads-up that by February, bulk senders must be compliant, or they’ll see a drop when emailing Gmail recipients.
If you’re an OCI Email Delivery sender and you have questions on compliance, contact me at any time. If you’re not an Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Email Delivery sender, start your free trial today.
Josh Nason
Senior Email Delivery Consultant
An email marketing veteran of more than a decade, Josh came to Oracle through the acquisition of Dyn. He currently works on both the Dyn and OCI Email Delivery teams, both assisting customers with email delivery issues and helping keep the network clean.
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