Getting Ready for Google’s New Email Rules

15 Jan Getting Ready for Google’s New Email Rules

When Google’s new email sender standards go into effect, you might see many emails that previously littered your inbox now head directly to the spam folder. You might want to read some of those emails, but the sender has not properly complied with Google’s new standards. So you’ll have to pull them from the spam, over and over again. But many of the emails that go away will be a welcome respite from the flood of unwanted marketing, political, and scam email that we all wade through daily. And over time, many of the worst offenders, the ones trying to phish us or hack our data, will hopefully be snuffed out, or forced to change domains much more often, making them less effective.

These new requirements may affect many smaller mailers, like small banks, credit unions, and companies that are using enterprise software to generate their invoices as they go paperless. Just having a service send an email from “billing@mycompanyme.com” to 5,000 users once a month can get your email tagged as a spam if it’s not done correctly.

Google has announced strict new email sender guidelines that go into effect in February, 2024. Google’s Gmail service claims just under 30% of email client users with 1.8 billion addresses.

Google has nearly three million corporate users, or 36 percent of the enterprise market, while Microsoft Outlook (and its Office 365 cloud service) has 332,000 more, with a market share of over 40%, according to 6Sense, a technology profile company. Google is telling all “bulk senders” who send over 5,000 emails per day from a single domain, that they need to support specific standards to add “unsubscribe” headers to their emails, and to comply with existing security controls to prevent misuse of domain names. These security controls include SPF, DKIM, DMARC, and ARC.

Bulk senders also mandate strict compliance with the “unsubscribe” standard described in RFC 8058 to allow one-click opt-out for marketing emails. Non-compliance will, immediately in some cases, result in those emails going to the user’s spam folder, due to a “quarantine” setting on the DMARC configuration if the sender has not properly arranged to use the domain the email is “from” on the servers that actually send the traffic. Over time, that “quarantine” can evolve into an email block as Google’s servers, using AI technology, determine the “reputation” of the sender’s computers.

DATAMATX always makes compliance, reliability and security our top priorities. Please contact your DATAMATX account manager to discuss options for our DocSight email delivery services, and to ensure you choose the best strategy to comply with these new requirements.