Over the next few months, Google and Yahoo email platforms will begin enforcing new requirements for bulk email senders. This is an effort to reduce some of those pesky spam, phishing, and fraudulent email messages that sneak past current filters.
Effective February 1, three guidelines should be implemented by anyone sending bulk email to Google and Yahoo recipients. However, they are enabling a grace period and stricter enforcement will begin in April of 2024.
The three guidelines are:
- Send from authenticated email domains
- Include one-click unsubscribe links, and comply to removal within 2 days
- Domain email spam rates should be under 0.3%
If you’re using a bulk email platform like Mailchimp, Constant Contact or your donor software tool, you should already be compliant on rules one and two.
While this will have the most impact on organizations that send 5,000 or more emails per day, there are still a few precautions you can take now, and continue working on, during the grace period to take action with the spam rate guideline:
- Check with your IT department to make sure you have an authenticated email domain.
- Make sure the “FROM” email matches your website domain. You should not send bulk email from a @gmail.com account, for example.
- To help with deliverability and spam rates, clean your email list. Check for hard bounce emails and remove them.
- Watch your reported spam rates in your email platform. Look for patterns in emails that are flagged as spam – such as content, email subjects, time of day.
- Set up your domain in Google Postmaster Tools to track data on email volume for your sending domain. Postmaster Tools helps you understand delivery errors, spam reports, etc.
These rules might seem daunting, but they’re in place to help us all send better email content, and have a happier inbox in return!