Will my company be affected?
If you send email newsletters to Gmail addresses, you may be affected. Unless you are collecting lists limited to your own domain, there is probably no one who does not have a Gmail address on their company's house list.
Additionally, there are more stringent requirements than usual , especially if you send more than approximately 5,000 emails per day to a Gmail account .
Please note that custom domains managed by Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) do not appear to be included in this update.
Specifically, what should I do and by when?
Below are the sender guidelines (requirements to avoid being identified as spam) announced by Google.
· Set up SPF and DKIM email authentication for your domain.
· Make sure that the domain or IP you send from has valid forward and reverse DNS records (also known as PTR records). Learn more
· Use TLS connections for sending email. For instructions on setting up TLS in Google Workspace, see Require secure connections for email
. · Keep your spam rate below 0.10% as reported by Postmaster Tools , and never exceed 0.30%. Learn more about spam rates . · Compose your email in a format that complies with
the Internet Message Format standard ( RFC 5322
). · Don't spoof Gmail From: headers. Gmail will start using the DMARC quarantine enforcement policy . Spoofing Gmail From: headers can affect email delivery.
· If you regularly forward email, for example by using a mailing list or inbound gateway, add the ARC header to your outgoing email. The ARC header indicates that the email has been forwarded and the sender is considered the forwarder. Mailing list senders must also add a List-id: header to their outgoing emails that specifies the mailing list.
・Configure DMARC email authentication for the sending domain. The DMARC enforcement policy can be set to none . Learn more
・For direct mail, the domain in the sender's From: header must match the SPF or DKIM domain. This is required to pass DMARC alignment
. ・Marketing and subscription emails must support one-click unsubscribe with a prominent unsubscribe link in the message body.
*Source: Guidelines for Email Senders
It would be best to make sure that you have cleared all of these by January 2024.
However, for non-engineers who have australia business email list not previously been involved in configuring mail servers, there may be some items that they honestly do not understand.
So, I've listed the minimum points you should keep in mind below. It's better if you can meet the stricter requirements, so I've used that as the base.
Make it easy to unsubscribe with one click
Keep spam rates below 0.1%
Pass all SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication
I think many people have already completed 1 and 2.
Method 1 : Unsubscribing is recommended in the " Guidelines for Sending Specified Email " issued by the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications , and in many cases you will already be doing this, but if you haven't done so yet, you should take action immediately.
Regarding the spam rate (number of spam reports divided by number of deliveries), I think that anything over 0.1% is quite high. It would be a good idea to review the frequency of deliveries, content, and list collection methods, and keep the spam rate below 0.01% (ideally 0%) .
Regarding 3, SPF, DKIM, and DMARC authentication, we checked with several senders of email newsletters that we actually receive, and it seems that as of January 2024, many companies have not yet implemented this (especially DMARC authentication).
The explanation from here on will inevitably involve technical terms, but SPF and DKIM authentication are set in the DNS records of the name server. DMARC can be cleared by correctly setting SPF authentication and DMARC records, and then matching the From domain (sender domain) in the header with the SPF domain.
